The Querolous American

So I have a new friend, by which I mean someone who I'll buy birthday presents for or at least feel guilty over if I forget or am too broke to buy presents for. Beastly sentence. Anyways, she's American and I like her pretty much best of all the girls who I've met here, and I realized in Paris my dearest girlf is also American. I spend a fair amount of time bashing America. For example, last night at a certain degree of highness, the F-word gave a mini-lecture on German cinema in the 1920's, to which my response was an extended diatribe about how emotionally retarded American cinema remains because of the historically infantilizing effect of the Hay's Code - though obviously I was too high to remember it was the Hay's Code - I think I called it 'that 1930's Jesuit shit' and the F-word understood.

My point is I spend a fair amount of time bashing American market dynamics, political structures, foreign policy, social programs, income inequality, et cetera - maybe less time than I spend bashing France or Canada, but still a disproportionate amount of time considering I've never lived there - and yet the cultural and social reference points I have in common with my American girlfriends makes their company just superb when I'm living abroad. There are particularities to living in Europe which wouldn't be tolerated in Canada, the States, or Australia which I need to discuss with people from those places when they bug me, just so I know I'm not going insane when they piss me off.

For example: though the F-word and I are European citizens and hence have the automatic right to live and work here in Belgium, the mandatory process of acquiring an identity card is one that takes several weeks and a couple of visits to the local city hall and police station. We need the identity card - our passports won't do, because they need to have our address on file. However, when I say the word 'file', I mean a physical slip of paper kept in a physical file, which is copied and given to the cops and other institutional bodies - eventually. And if there is a mistake on that piece of paper, all the copies of that piece of paper must be hunted down and corrected or the mistake will remain for the length of your tenure in Belgium.

In the case of my American friend and her Dutch husband, such a mistake was made four years ago when they registered at the local city hall and the trog civil slave there registered them as living in separate apartments in the same building, though they were married. The consequence of this is that four years later, they're still taxed as individuals instead of as a family, because not all the pieces of paper have been corrected. Every year she complains to the taxation authorities, every year they refer her back to her local city hall so the trog civil slaves there can correct the mistake, every year the trogs fail to do so and every year she's taxed once more as an individual instead of as a family.

Of course, in Canada or the States (at least in California, where she's from), records would be sufficiently integrated and electrified that the mistake could be corrected over the phone, probably whilst talking to the tax people, and never worried about again. But making an effort towards that degree of integration and electrification here - taking away all those little physical slips of paper - would mean that half of the troggy civil slaves responsible for their upkeep, copying, and correcting would become even more redundant than they are now. Then the government would try to cut civil slavey jobs, and then there'd be strikes. The country would shut down for a few weeks, billions of euros pissed down the drain, and in the end the records would stay papery and shitty because it's fundamentally cheaper that way. If you think about it stupidly.

Dreams of permanency

Alright, I'm over the Wii. It was good while it lasted but it's not anything you couldn't have played with in a science centre back in the late 90's. We're not getting one and I'm getting a gym membership. Life here has kept me relatively hardbodied, as I'm walking and biking everywhere, and the shittacular elevators in my building even persuade me to do 16-flight stair hikes which I would normally never even consider. But I have She-Hulk fantasies that I'm nowhere close to realizing, and too much tension from the desk time, so the gym it must be.

Five days or so to go before probation is over and I'm waiting with baited breath - no talk of sacking me yet so I don't think it will happen - but you never know. Management is British and they may just be being polite in that absolutely unhelpful British way. I don't think so, though. I think it will probably be okay. And once I get permanency, the classes and gym memberships will start, and before you know it I'll be twice as hardbodied and clever as I am now. Hubris? Well, no, because we don't have a television, which means I have the time and energy for it. If we had a television of course I'd be fucked.

A little light dinner conversation

So there's actually a debate now in Great Britain about abortion. It's not the same debate as in the States, about its fundamental legality or illegality, but I suppose touches on the same emotional question of its murderousness or non-murderousness. 194,000 in a year, if you ignore the 6,000 from Ireland. That does seem like rather a lot and much of the debate seems to centre around whether women are using it as a form of birth control rather than as . . . well . . . birth control. I mean, what else is abortion? It's a considered decision that one doesn't want to give birth. You can hardly blame women for using it as birth control considering it's fucking birth control.

What takes me back about the numbers, though, is if there are 194,ooo unwanted pregnancies there's probably exponentially more than 194,ooo instances of unprotected sex with people who you don't want to make a baby with, which I must say doesn't go far towards rectifying the image of the British as reckless drunkard aidoiomaniacs whose vies intimes are based on some sort of dare. Most of the ladies I work with are English, and many of them complain about how the Continentals perceive them as tipsy floozies who might give it up on the hood of a car, no strings attached, if you tell them they have nice eyes. I figure figures about 200,000 abortions a year aren't likely to help them out of that perception; I've been through my own tipsy floozy years, and it's not that hard to insist on the contraception string.

Especially in the face of the fact emergency contraception is available there. I mean, are there seriously 194,000 women a year there who can't get it together during the three days after unprotected sex to get to a doctor or pharmacist? Or are there almost 2 million women who do, and the 194,000 just represents the 10% failure rate? It's rather nasty the pharmacists are allowed to choose whether or not they hand it out to women in need - I mean, come on buddy, if you wanted to indulge a God complex at work, you should have sprung for the eight years of extra education to become a surgeon. But are so many indulging that women can't get the pill over a three day span?

More whining

Saw Batman Begins last night and thought it was a fine little superhero movie. I could have done without the love interest, which seemed contrived and distracted me from adding some texture to the storyline by imagining a nice Mistress La Spliffe sandwich with slices of Christian Bale and Cillian Murphy, but all in all it made me want to sick up less than all the other superhero or Batman movies I can remember. In fairness, I cannot remember the one before the one Michelle Pfieffer dressed up as Catwoman.

Of course, the scale on which I measure my fondness for these types of movies can be gauged along how much they make me want to sick up, with their Bruce Campbell-ian dialogue which is never delivered by Bruce Campbell unless it's an Evil Dead movie so what's the fucking point of talking like that. So I had a little think about superhero movies generally, which of course goes beyond the people in the silly costumes to the army-of-one cops that Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson built their careers on, whose brains would obviously be smeared across the pavement in the first ten minutes of any of the situations they deal with onscreen.

The conclusion was that they're the boy's own equivalent of rom-coms. I feel exactly the same way about rom-coms that I do about superhero movies and they're probably produced by exactly the same people. And then boys make fun of girls for liking rom-coms and girls make fun of boys for liking fetishistic hero movies. What a bloody world.

The Red Dragon Channels Eeyore

Deep depression this weekend, half biology, half weather. Watched a Neil LaBute play on Saturday about murdering children, gays, etc., which actually cheered me up on the basis of how annoying it was, which proved a distraction to my

deep

deep

pisser.

Watched the 'Cash' episode of the Young Ones and fell in love with the Mad Naked Bloke, which just made the depression worse. Because if I met a Mad Naked Bloke like that in real life, it'd be repellent. Isn't that depressing? Sigh.

Evolution Revolution Love, Red Dragon Style

Fucking International Herald Tribune. Put together a potentially awesome article about the evolution of sight and lunar triggers for coral orgies and then throw in an absolutely twat-faced paragraph like this:

'People have known about the moon's romantic possibilities for a long time. Shakespeare in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" relies on moonlight to set the mood. The 1987 movie "Moonstruck" features a love story centered on "La Bella Luna."'

It better have been an intern or a daughter on a Daddy/Daughter Day that put that shit together. I mean, if it was in the Metro or something, fine, but the IHT? Do you ever get the feeling everybody is dumbing down everything? And bringing up Moonstruck, indeed. Moonstruck was the rape of a culture. Did anybody buy those people as Italian besides fat bone-white troglodytes who pronounce it 'Eye-talian' and 'lazag-nee'? And they bring it up in the same sentence as Shakespeare. What a joke. What a fucking world.

You must excuse me - the first news item I saw today wasn't that, but the news 126 people were just blown up in Pakistan. So I have the feeling the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I feel like that more and more these days. I can give myself pause, think about world wars, colonialism, concentration camps, Inquisitions, sown epidemics, potato famines, and lots of things like that, and try to convince myself the world is no closer to getting to hell than it's ever been, but I find that technique works less and less at abating my feelings of impending doom.

I guess as people get older they tend to stop thinking things like "the Tudor period was hard, the Second World War was awful, Colonialism was a massive international disaster that benefited a tiny fraction of the people involved - why, things are quite good now in comparison!", because they realize that you can Capitalize and categorize historical events or periods of time in a textbook, but in real life history has a sloppy way of leading up to the present. And all the shit in the world gets to feeling cumulative instead of episodic. Or maybe they don't realize that and that's why people are so shitty at understanding each other when it counts. I don't know.

Anyways, that sort of culmination might only be on my mind because we watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night. Stanley Kubrick obviously had a thing for sandy blue-eyed blondes who look like The Ex. Besides noticing that I have to say I lost most of my interest once there were no more monkeys.

The monkey bit, however, was awesome. I totally bought it. That was a great discovery of how to bash things, and it was one hundred percent believable to me that the monkey was inspired to bash by looking at the pretty smooth alien thing. Hollywood should make more caveman movies, that's a genre they've left pretty fallow since the 70's, which means it's due as God forbid they should think up something original. It'd be so cheap too - just dress a bunch of actors up in rags, get them to grunt, carry on, and invent the adjective or something. Get some big trained cats and some bears in to add tension, and film all the love scenes doggy-style. There. Done.

Mistress La Spliffe is shrewish

You know, the bloody Economist. I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's my favourite magazine ever, and if I was stuck on a desert island with a reliable subscription I'd only wail and gnash my teeth half as much as I would have otherwise. But only they could do something as egg-headedly chauvinistic as comparing hidden female oestrus to an 'evolutionary arms race between the sexes'. No, scratch that. Only they would find such a snarky huge metaphor to elaborate on what the mainstream attitude to evolutionary biology amounts to: a five-million year version of Taming of the Shrew. Fuck me, people are tedious.

(Just to go off course for a moment on how tedious people are - have you noticed? Complaining endlessly about how fucked up, complicated, baffling, infuriating, evil, inferior and all the rest of it the opposite sex are, and yet still devoting thousands of hours of brain power and billions of dollars to being noticed, accepted and loved by that same opposite sex when they could be painting or reading a book or something. Fucking tedious. Like a poisonous spiny fish that desperately wants to be cuddled by a grizzly bear. Make up your mind, you pack of twats, or just shut the fuck up and go home and jerk off. Bleeding Jeebus, it gives me the shits. Okay, digression done.)

Anyways, it's this sort of mainstream opinion that gives mainstream opinions a bad name, because it starts from an assumption about our nature which I think is assuming too much. And that is that the fundamental nature of human sexual relations is that a woman tricks a man into staying with her and sharing his resources with her, which a man will only do if he's convinced her children are also his. And hidden oestrus helps with this by only letting a man be sure her children are his if he stays with her nearly constantly and fucks her all the time. And this is why today we all get married and only nail other people on the down-low. It seems like all evolutionary theories in the Western world start from this point, to either reinforce or modify it but never to reject it and admit that maybe marriage is just a construct.

There are countless indications to tell us stay-and-fuck-constantly marriage model is flawed - societies where marital-type situations are of no importance compared to avuncular or matrilineal blood ties, societies where women select their mates out of line-ups, polyandrous societies. But perhaps most damningly for the the stay-and-fuck-constantly model, there's the fact that men never stay and fuck their women constantly, even in the most monogamous of monogamous societies, because it's their job to chase and kill animals and each other. Marriage is just one breeding model of dozens and dozens, and there's no evidence at all it was some sort of original, instinctual or 'right' model. It just happens to be ours so that's what everybody works with.

But oh wait - come back to it - because now we have a really important indication of how the stay-and-nail-constantly theory needs adjusting to make it right. Dr. Wilson has announced the results of his Albuquerque study: strippers make more money when they're ovulating and less when they're infertile, which means men must be able to perceive fertility on some level, which turns all this back into a slightly more complicated evolutionary Taming of the Shrew instead of the glorious and varied pageant that human sexuality is. This means the men can fuck their women when they're fertile and go off killing animals and each other when they're not, and still be pretty sure any kids popped are theirs. Huzzah! Marriage makes perfect evolutionary sense again! We're right! Africa, etc., is wrong!

Never mind that if he had actually spoken to the strippers, his sister, mother, wife, granny, or, like, any chick ever, he could have found out that women have more energy and sexual interest in men when they're ovulating and less when they're on the pill or on the rag. And possibly, possibly that might make strippers dance a little bit more energetically and engagedly, and possibly that might result in the punters giving them more money. But noooooo. That's far too simple. It must be about an evolutionary arms race between the sexes and the marriage model must be just plain simply fucking right.

Holy fucking tittyfuck. I can't believe people get funding to make this shit up when I have to work for a living. Did I mention people were tedious?

I'm only blogging because I haven't got a Wii yet

I'm eating polenta for breakfast and it's slightly less gaggable than the porridge I generally choke down to stop me from getting hungry before one. Yep, my life has devolved to blogging about my breakfast. That's what happens when you have a nine-to-five job, or in my case a nine-thirty-to-six job. I can't complain. Other people work more, other people work harder. But someday I'll only work when I want to. Someday . . . Not today.

Still reading The Old Patagonian Express and starting to get sick of it. The bastard has got all the way to Guatemala and doesn't seem to have found a place or person he likes yet, unless you count the highly erotic silhouette of a girl or woman in a backlit doorway he passes on the train, and even that seemed to make him more uncomfortable than happy. But it's still beautifully written and still engaging enough to keep going, at the least to see if he does find a place he doesn't grumble about before getting to the tip of the continent. And it makes me want to read Pudd'nhead Wilson.

One way it's beautifully written is its evocation of a more civilized time on trains. Being back in Europe, I'm back on trains in a way that wasn't really possible in Canada, as without fail driving is more reliable there and adjusting travel plans by a couple of weeks means someone can give you a ride between cities. Here it's cheap and fast, cheap and fast enough to generally compete with low-cost airlines or the coach (though we're coaching it to Berlin - booooo - but the night train is more than twice as expensive, a really absurd price, and there's no other direct option from Belgium) and certainly cheaper and faster than driving over longish distances.

But it's not as I remember it. Every year the trains get faster and more efficient, and they get less and less comfortable. When I was living in Italy just a few years ago, the oldish espresso trains had compartments in all the classes where, if you were alone, you could lock the door, pull down the six passenger seats into one double bed, and make sweet love with your sweetheart. ALL classes. Now making love sitting plum upright on these horrible open trains with nothing shielding you but the seatbacks, even if you spring for first class, is liable to net you an obscenity charge.

One day speed and efficiency will get a little less fashionable and people will realize we're refined creatures and that we have aesthetic needs, and that a 12 hour train journey without at least a little head is contrary to our higher nature. In the meantime, I'll still take trains because at least they're not aeroplanes, which scare the lust straight out of me.

I found Jesus; he switched his cellphone back on

So. Jesus Camp. You can pretty much imagine how it went. The ongoing indoctrination of a bunch of devoted Pentecostal kids of the non-compassionate type - you know, the sort that's more about glossolia performance art, how demonically wrong everyone else has it, and not being stuck on this iniquitous floating rock when God decides it's curtains than it is about taking Jesus's life as some sort of example and struggling to alleviate the burdens of your fellow man in a very practical feeding-the-crowds sort of way or healing-the-blind sort of way. Christianity as unmitigated self-centredness.

And that's all. I didn't feel good watching the movie. It didn't add anything to what I know about Pentecostals or do anything else useful. There was an amusing five minute cameo by Ted Haggard - probably one of his last before the meth'n'manwhore bust - and a strong feeling that adults who involve themselves with children's ministry are prrrrrrobably perverts - one pro-life rally organizer took the time to tell a little girl she looked good with the "life" duct tape over her mouth as he pressed it on. . . uhm . . . yeah.

I think the film caused some talk when it came out because all this was done without commentary from the documentarians - it's mostly just footage of the Pentecostals. But then there were five or so insertions of blathering from some Air America guy who didn't serve any purpose except to remind us what we were watching was INSANE. Fine. But I went out with the same conviction I had going in - children love to perform the way adults congratulate them for. Until they hit puberty, which of course the documentarians couldn't show us, because teenage rebellion against Christian fundamentalism wouldn't be INSANE enough. Bah. Skip it. No thumbs up. Just go to a zoo and watch the monkeys jerk off, it's about as edifying.

Ranking the weekend

Fucking awesome: the Wii. Oh god it's so good. A work couple who I'm going to have to find a pseudonym for if I keep liking them as much as I do got one last week and invited us over to play with it. We played until five in the morning and it was only overwhelming physical exhaustion that could persuade me to put down the console . . . I spent hours the next day trying to rationalize buying one for our household (cheaper than a gym membership! More likely to be used than a gym membership!) and did a great job, though I always ran up against the hurdle of knowing it would be the end of my intellectual life, until I got sick of it at least, which just might not happen.

God, Nintendo wins. They get the console out underpricing the new PlayStation and whatever that Microsoft Shitbox is called, and they make it fucking awesome. They make it so that everyone will love it - children, chicks, and people over fifty - it's just so . . . so . . . Well. So evil. For the first time, and obviously this is a sign of advancing age, I understand why Christian types usually think fun things are evil - dancing, gambling, drinking, and the Wii (yes, I'm suggesting it's right up there on the Fun-o-meter, though fornication still leaves it behind). It's so distracting. It precludes doing almost anything else if you have one around . . . and it's also interactive, something you can do in a big screaming hearty group, so you don't get the funny feeling that you're turning into a spotty World of Warcraft island of one - there'd be nothing to stop you just playing that shit forever . . . there'd be nothing to stop everybody from playing that shit forever, and then what would happen to the human race? It'd have a fuckload of fun, that's what.

Anyways. The Wii was a nice thing about the weekend. Another nice thing about the weekend was that the weather was lovely and we spent Sunday sitting around the park in the sun, while the F-word painted and I read The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. It's a non-fiction narrative about the author's attempt to travel from Massachusetts to the southernmost tip of South America by train, and so far it's fucking awesome. The opposite of Bruce Chatwin's wide-eyed, stripped-down prose, but very good in its opposition - a touch mean-spirited, but readable with it. I'll write more when I read more.

Also had a go at Enduring Love by Ian McEwan over the last little while and found the first 38 pages to be interminable shit. I think it's defeated me because just thinking about continuing to read it makes me think "awwwwwwww, fuck, let's just buy a Wii". I just get so fucking annoyed with these modern Big Men of Literature who seem to be absolutely incapable of writing a book that isn't a film treatment in disguise. Okay, maybe that's where the money is - fine. Chase the money. But I'll still think you're jerks who history will forget, or else vilify for trying to bastardize one form of art for another. Go get a contract with Time-Warner, you whores.

Also saw Jesus Camp, of which more later.

What would Jesus do?

So I think I understand what Hilts is saying to a point, and I think his attitude towards the Church resembles lots of Catholics', and that that's great. I'd like to point out that when I blather on about the Catholic Church, I'm not trying to turn anybody away from it just because I turned away from it, but deep down that might not be true because in my heart of hearts I'm still pissed Mum just converted. But in my conscious head at least, I'm not trying to turn anyone away from it.

Sugar may disagree, and so may millions of others, but I feel like religious faith is a beautiful thing - that most spiritual disciplines, except the very stupidest, offer some sort of helpful framework for approaching your relationship with the world and your fellow man, and that for children especially it can be really helpful - a sort of series of parables instructing you on how to love when your raging id just wants to slash and burn. I'm glad I grew up Catholic for what Hilts talked about - the way it taught me to love people for their humanity if nothing else, to figuratively speaking turn the other cheek (though I usually didn't), and a sort of beautiful pantheism teaching me that anything I hurt is all of us, or God, or whatever, so it's best not to hurt things.

So I spent my childhood thinking Catholics should act in love and tumbled out of Catholicism when that thought smacked up against the reality of the Church. The love of women that could be communicated through ministry is devalued completely with no good excuse. The love between a man and a woman is treated as a distraction from God rather than as a reminder of Her superpowers. And that's ignoring the distinct lack of love present in so many of the Church's actions and policies over the last 1000 years. Coincidentally since they stopped letting priests get married, to make sure there weren't any disputes over the inheritance of 'Church' property. Men have always told me not having sex for awhile makes them lose their minds a little bit and I think the history of Catholic ministry is a good way for them to argue that case. 'Babeeeeee . . . I'm hurtin' . . . . you're going to make me set up an anti-papacy in Avignon. . . '

And so much of it for crass, worldly political expedience. Liberation Theology was shot down by the Vatican when the people who needed it the most, needed it the most. The choice of an old-fashioned (if pretty fucking hot when he was young) Pole to lead the Church during turbulent times because he was an anti-Communist from a Communist country. The assassination of John Paul I, who would have let us all wear condoms even if it meant cutting down on the growth rate of the flock . . . not that all those impoverished people aren't going Evangelical these days anyways because it's so much more fun with the singing and the dancing and the babysitting and the useful social assistance and whatnot - okay, I'm getting a bit anti-Mel-Gibson here, but ten bucks says it was an assassination. Come on, it's the Catholic Church we're talking about here, not Mohatma Fucking Ghandi.

Hilts isn't quite sure if he believes in God as such - I do - I can't explain it, beyond saying that I always feel that there's a great warm beautiful overarching thing in the universe that desperately, desperately wants us all to not fuck up. And my relationship with that thing will always be more or less Christian because I was raised with a great bloody loving Jesus as a daily figure. It will also always be more or less Catholic because the Church has so many ways to help us approach that figure that are part of my brain forever and that I wouldn't part with, like the saints and his mum and meditation and mysticism and all the rest of it.

But Daddy is right - the Church is rotten - and the people who love the Church need to struggle to reform it so it really is about love again, even if it's just one parish at a time, even if it results in Colonel Ratzinger and his Flying Monkeys excommunicating them. I bet that's what Jesus would do.

Defrock me, mariachi

Heaven knows why it is, but I have always loved the term 'defrocked nuns'. I used to want to be a nun, you know. Sister Maria Splifferia Consuela or whatever. That ambition ended with puberty, but it wasn't just about the way Antonio Banderas went from greasy to suddenly very in-ter-es-ting - it was about that teenage condition which is common to us all, even those of us who didn't wonder what Antonio Banderas looked like naked - a sudden and violent mistrust of hierarchy.

In terms of my ongoing rupture with the church, the most important facets of that are the moral and the spiritual. Can a person take moral instruction from a hierarchical structure and remain moral, and hence pleasing in the eyes of God herself? Can a person be a spiritual if they are taking their spirituality in measured doses from a several-degrees-removed arbiter who dictates what's spiritual and what isn't? And can a Christian sect be anything but naughty when it suggests that struggles towards personal spirituality and morality are acts of pride, and if we don't want to go to hell we should surrender these personal struggles - surrender the possibility of personal revelation, in short - in favour of obedience to a hierarchical structure that has a repellent history of using the money it gouges out of its members to promote torture, bloodshed and suffering?

This is the big old question, and in my case one that was put often to the Catholic Church when my poor Daddy called in the priests to talk me down all those years ago. It was never really answered for me, certainly not by the priests, and it precludes me ever becoming Catholic again, or joining any Christian sect that doesn't abandon both human hierarchies and the idea that revelation is selective. But Daddy and I had a religious talk when he was last here, and 15 or so years into my rather self-consciously loud departure from the church, I finally got the balls to ask him how he could put up with all its iniquities. He explained that the Church was rotten, damaged, and corrupt, but that Catholics loved it and it was their job to fight the iniquities within the hierarchy to reform it. That satisfied me.

The Probation of Mistress La Spliffe

Read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and all I can say is that Dorothy Sayers is way, way better than Agatha Christie. But then Dorothy Sayers is way better than everybody. Nice twist there, Agatha. You could tell she was pretty proud of it. In fact, it was way too easy to tell how proud she was. Still. I suppose it was a big innovation at the time. Blah.

Getting into a bit of a funk. I wish my probation was over; I wish I'd been getting any sort of feedback besides a periodic 'oh, great market report' or 'oh, good story.' Yabbut . . . are enough of the market reports good? Are enough of the stories good? Are you going to sack me, or are you going to keep giving me lots of money every month so I can get my eyes operated on and have a comfortable old age? Today being October 10, I believe, we're down to the wire. 20 more physical days - October 30, it ends. The normal probationary period in Belgiumland is three months, not six, which means I could have started really emotionally settling down here three months ago. But I do see that wouldn't have been realistic. I wasn't doing all my job yet three months ago.

They'd better not sack me. One of the girls there just bought a Wii and I want to be able to go to her place after work to get high and play with it. And I'm starting to like it there, too. Oh well. We'll see.

Orson Welles smacks down

Magnum has proposed to his lady friend, a good one, and I hope they get married soon so I can go home for a bit. I'm a touch homesick these days. Belgium has beautiful spots of colour but there is nowhere, absolutely nowhere like northern Ontario in the fall - chilly enough to make the mosquitoes die, good crisp sun, and miles and miles of continuous and startling orange and red hues across the landscape. When I think about climate change, I think about that - how awful it would be if that landscape were to change - since I somehow refuse to wrap my head around island nations sinking and Australian-type drought.

Watched Orson Welles' Macbeth last night - it ran a little roughshod over some of my favorite scenes, but I really liked it in terms of the acting and and loved it in terms of the interpretation, and so I thought about how much I hate Kenneth Branagh. Well, hate is a strong word. How little I like Kenneth Branagh. He didn't really add anything to filmed Shakespeare besides lots of shouting and millions of dollars.

What I liked best from him was Henry V, which had the least shouting and as far as I can tell the fewest millions of dollars, despite some fighting sequences. But even that was a bit shit compared to Orson Welles' Macbeth, and I'm not sure if that's down to direction (though the use of a set more suggestive than representative worked really well in Macbeth) or if it's just down to Orson Welles being motherfucking Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh not being Orson Welles. Probably a bit of column A, a bit of column B.

PETA sucks.

I've always felt that way - could never bear the preoccupation with attacking/using celebrities in their promotions and could never bear their cock-eyed perspectives on the rights and wrongs of a human being's relationship with animals; it all comes off as such superficial trash when organizations like Greenpeace actually do stuff instead of contenting themselves with getting Pamela Anderson to shoot her mouth off about the battery farming of chickens by KFC. I mean, the very name - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - when the ethics of a person's relationship with animals is far too variable a thing to base the foundation of an organization on - it's fucking lame.

But I might never have bothered to think that out if I hadn't heard about this. Puke. The foundation sinks to the level of an intrusive gossip blog run by a moronic 19 year old who thinks he has a good enough grasp of the personalities of the famous to decide he knows what's best for their pet dogs, or else who is just desperate, desperate for any kind of media mention and isn't afraid of sounding like a fucking incompetent to get it.

Try going out and saving some whales, you gaggle of parasites. That's be a fuck site more 'ethical' than being pathetic twats. I don't really eat meat anymore but I'm so disgusted I think I'm going to search out some foie-gras covered veal for lunch.

It's not TMI if you use fancy words

The F-word is back, and indeed it wasn't a second too soon, because I'm in oestrus. Have been for a couple of days. For the first time in more than a year I've had nowhere to channel my state of oestrus, so I've been observing it carefully. And I don't just say this because I myself am endlessly fascinating: women are endlessly fascinating creatures.

One of the remarkable things is the staring. The way a pert ass walking by makes the head swivel. The irresistible up-down sweep taking in the goods, that my middle-class manners can barely keep subtle when a nice piece of something passes on the street. It's very mannish, and it backs up my theory that men are just women who live in a perpetual state of simultaneous oestrus and pre-menstrual tension, so we should all try to understand each other a little better than we do.

Another of the remarkable things is the sense of smell, which suddenly goes from a sense to a superpower. I can smell perfectly clean people from ten paces on a windy day, and perfectly clean men from farther. It's the oddest thing when smelling can inform you who's walked in the room, or that the fecking gorgeous blue-eyed Sicilian pizza guy is just around the corner as you walk to the falafel shop. We don't pay enough attention to our sense of smell generally. If you haven't read the massive Swiss blockbuster Perfume yet, get to it - I think it's one of the best novels of our generation.

And finally, there's the way that sex with almost everybody becomes a realistic possibility - not an attractive one, mind you, indeed usually exactly the opposite. But nonetheless a visualizable option that a conscious part of your brain has to reject, instead of a hypothetical one that doesn't even bother swimming up from the subconscious. I have a feeling that's also fairly mannish.

And all of this, as well as a couple of subtle physiological things, within the framework of concealed ovulation, so that outside of the fact that maybe women stare a bit more and know who you are without looking up from her desk, the rest of the world has no idea.

God, human beings are so strange! So beautifully and oddly adapted! For me, this sort of thing is what really separates us from the other animals - not our opposable thumbs, our big brains, or our porcine ability to eat almost any old rubbish - but things like concealed ovulation, the female orgasm, minimal but key sexual dimorphism, and the way willies hang out of gentlemen's bodies on display for the ladies instead of getting tucked up inside them until they're in use. Our sexual organization in general.

It is so gloriously fucked up compared to all the other animals - the most poetic sexuality out there - except maybe for the bonobos', but I don't like them that hairy. So hurrah for sex, ladies and gentlemen: it's more than a replacement for television. In my book, it brings us closer to that Big Bonobo in the Sky.

Nick Cave has an opinion on this too:

What a wicked thing to say

The F-word is coming back sometime today and it won’t be a moment too soon. I miss him something awful. Gross, isn’t it? But I’m feeling a little fragile as winter has set in here. Last night I came home around 8 – the night before that, 2 in the morning – and there was absolutely no difference in the quality of the inky, damp, chilly darkness. I live in goddamn Scandinavia, except it was too goddamn cloudy all goddamn summer to get any of that Land of the Midnight Sun shit.

So I’m going through my last month of probation at work and obviously I’m on tenterhooks, because after five months I’ve really got used to being given money. Had a bit of hair of the dog last night with an IT-er from work who explained to me that the high turnover in my department was down to people quitting and/or losing their fucking minds, and that getting the sack should be the least of my worries. Do I feel better? Sure.

Speaking of. This week, whilst the F-word has been painfully absent from my life, I've been distracting myself by taking an interest in my surroundings at work and whoa, nelly. These people talk. You know, about each other. At one point, a girl who'd been telling me lots of juicy shit, like about the annoyingly naïve young thing that sits across from me nailing the assembly-line hotty in sales and my predecessor stalking my boss, paused in her conversation when the name of another girl at the office came up. She looked at me straight in the eye and said, "I'm telling you. Look out. Look out. Watch what you say to her because it will spread around."

Alright. I'm not complaining. I love hearing gossip, particularly gossip that adds some dimension to the annoying girl who sits across from me or to the reason my boss is a bit abrupt until you get to know her. And that's what it's all about, isn't it? Adding interest to our relationships. Making people seem complicated and engaging somehow. Livening up our workdays. But I better let go of the illusion my words have any kind of privacy in there, and accept that they'll probably have legs that will take them to meanings I never even dreamed of.

You know what it amounts to, don't you? My next piece of investigative journalism; you give a a music video 12 years and it turns funny. I mean, it's a pretty song and reminds me of Wild at Heart and all, but when he stares at the camera singing I can't suspend my sexy disbelief anymore:

Lesson One in becoming a Muckraking Journalist:

Journalists drink a lot. You don't drink a lot. Don't go drinking with journalists the night before deadline. Gah gah gah gah gah.

Muck raked this morning (briefly - excuse me - efforts to be human call) - when Madonna collaborates with young performers, she sucks away what modest soul they may have in a way that reminds me of Elizabeth Bathory, and when David Bowie does the same, it makes me want to cry in a nice way.



I'm missing the Arcade Fire at the beginning of November. We're going to Berlin instead. That will be sweet - I love Berlin - but still, fuck. I think I'll try to see them elsewhere on the tour on a weekend away. After all, I'm middle class now; I can do that sort of shit.

Breaking the Whaaaaaaa?

So at the moment I’m reading The Waves and taking a long time to do it. I’m the sort of reader who throws words back like lemon filling at a pie-eating contest, but that’s not a book you can do that with. It’s poetry. Reading it slooooowly is a joy – letting each character sink in – each clearly delineated person with their little motifs and their loves and their patterns of seeing, and then thinking about it during the day, letting it recur.

And such rich, fine language. You know, fuck Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. I don’t really mean that, mind you, at least in Graham Greene’s case as I really do love him, but just to make a point for a second, fuck them. You want balls in your writing, you look at Virginia Woolf. She was willing to stretch language to the breaking point to get across the images and emotions she wanted to get across, and she did, AND she never quite broke the language. None of that pared-down choose-your-own-adventure shit for her.

I love her something fierce. There’s this one section in Orlando when she writes about how frustrating it is to have too many s’s on the page when you’re composing something, and since reading that I've loved her like she was some person I knew. She seems to have had such a conscious relationship with language, and a healthy one - one that had been psychoanalyzed by a competent professional. Pity that such a degree of consciousness wasn't the right kind to stop her drowning herself, but illness is illness and illness has got rid of lots of my favourite writers before their time. I'd punch myself in the face for another Emily Brontë novel, for example. Even if it was crap. Imagine. One novel from Emily Brontë, twelve and counting from Martin Spewbag Amis. What a vomitous world it is at times.

Last night, when I was taking a break from The Waves, I watched Barton Fink, and for the first time in a long time, a movie made me honestly think ‘what the fuck?’ Just to keep it simple for myself, I’m going to pretend the whole thing was an autobiographical movie script Fink imagined when writer’s block first set in and he looked at the picture of the lady on the beach while pondering the creative process in a commercialized context. I don’t fully believe that, but it’s tidy, and in any case as a plot device it’s better than anything they’ve done since they started using the A-list. I reccommend it, but I reccommend it with reefer, which I didn't have last night.

All the world loves a lover

The F-word is off on a school trip and I miss him pretty bad, but I’m also enjoying a bit of girly time with girl friends, and having some girly time to myself, listening to girly music like the Grinderman album and writing girly poetry about how I’d like to turn into an elephant so that it would take 500 bullets to bring me down. The conviction is there, but it’s not writing itself. Not angry enough these days.

Last night, I got high and watched a documentary about making gays stop being gay. You can find it on this page, under the title Gay Conversion. What a money spinner that looks to be. It’s times like this that I know I have principles, because if I didn’t that’s a bandwagon I’d jump onto faster than a young, naked, beckoning Charles Bronson. Invent a therapist qualification, move to the States and get my business card into the hands of broken-hearted parents. I could have lovely foamy money baths while having a money fight with my expensive ponies as they galloped past through my money fields, but I won’t.

Couple of reasons. One: I still remember the day I first had a chance to get a gay man to stop being gay - a gay man I’d been finding very hot to boot. And while this was back in my most undiscriminating days, I put his drunk ass in a cab for Boystown without a second thought. Even then, when I'd make bets with myself in the morning over what bed I'd end up in that night, I couldn’t stand the sudden conviction in the air that one hole was as good as another, which is all I think gay conversion programmes, no matter how expensive, can convince somebody of.

Which leads to the second reason: the God angle driving the thing is false advertising. I’m sure the loving, all-powerful God who I invoke whenever some Belgian twat opens a car door in my bicycle’s path doesn’t care about holes as long as we’re kind to the people they belong to. But when one pretends He does, money becomes no object – do you want to keep your money, or do you want an eternity of hellfire for you and your child? And if you start on children young enough, you don’t even have to restrict the financial bonanza to gays and their families – you could extend it to the families of millions of poor little kids who play doctor with their friends or stare quizzically at each other in the shower, trying to work out what’s normal.

I’m in awe at the way the corollaries of American Christianity bleed the flock dry. Tithing I get – it’s like taxation, if your ministry has an admirable social agenda. But convincing the flock that gayness is wrong enough to spend $2000 a week ‘curing’. . . can’t you imagine God calling these people to account and asking, if they had the power to extract that much money from their flock, why they didn’t use it to relieve the suffering of the truly desperate instead of to try to convince their clients that one hole was as good as another? What fun.

No, gentle readers, I fear God too much to become an ungayist, and you have spoken, or at least 11 of you have, and 72% of that 11 suggested that I become a muckraking journalist. So instead I will ferret out the iniquitous and unexpected in our nasty, naughty world, and throw it at your feet. But I’m not going to Russia; that place is fucked up. And I also reserve the right to be 13% novelistic and 8% ornamental. So here’re the results of my first investigation – what an early-70’s Japanese commercial for a product called Mandom, advertised by Charles Bronson, looks like.

Answer: I want to say NSFW, but I think I’m the only person who’d see it as pornographic instead of just fucking hilarious: