Death, monkeys, and dancing bears

Thinking about the meaning of death in different cultures these days. My study of non-European cultures has been either so academic or so pop, so Bhagavad Gita or else Monkey!, that I have no practical idea what death means to people outside Europe. There's something rather brutal about the dominant thread we have in Europe and North America now. Centuries of training by our religion to see life as a linear progression to death and to the subsequent judgement of our selves, as we now understand our selves, by God, who we comprehend as another self. I think we still have that pattern, if you can call something so simple a pattern, in our minds. But now, for so many of us, especially in Europe, who have been repelled by the church, we've lost even the small complication of the assumption of judgement at the end - just the simple linear sentence of our selves, growing and aging and dying, and then a sudden full stop.

But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .

I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.

Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.

In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):

A post-mortem will be held to determine which was the cause of death:

A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie

The Complainant Gardener

Another short one today as the weather continues to buck my negative expectations and made irresistible sitting on the salvaged bench on our balcony, surrounded by flourishing tomato, cucumber, pea and lots of other plants, including some from our upstairs neighbour. I'm taking care of her balcony while she's away but she asked me to bring these two to my own balcony, because they're perennials that will flower while she's gone, and she didn't want them to go to waste. I love Germans.

It's a pity my camera cable is still lost because this morning I found the first tomato (or it could be tomatillo, I don't know) flower turning into fruit - a little green lump of swelling fertility - and I have a powerful urge to share it with the world, which I'm sure will manage to keep turning even without a blow-by-blow photo account of My Second Garden* . I'm starting to understand my family's men and their garden-feelings - and the Italians and the English were equally enthusiastic. When I'm sitting on my balcony surrounded by things that are flourishing in my care, I feel as smug, proud, and happy as if I'd just invented photosynthesis.

Oh, you know what I was writing yesterday about the other shoe dropping? It dropped. The ABC stopped streaming The Chasers War on Everything outside of Australia. I guess the big flap over the dying children sketch gave them that little bit of publicity that had too many furrrrrriners tuning in and, I don't know, but I'm pissed off.

*My first was a 2mx2m patch in my father's massive garden in the house where I did most of my growing up - but I only grew root vegetables there. I was four, for fuck's sake. Man, would I ever love to have a 2mx2m patch now. But space is such a different concept in Europe, which is no doubt a huge part of why I've started to feel it's time to leave.

The happy side of SAD

A short one today because I had to sleep in this morning because of more driving and properly meeting my upstairs neighbour, a German who's pretty awesome and who, with any luck, I'll be swapping plant attendance duties in the future instead of relying on an increasingly unreliable friend with a chemically dwindling short-term memory who lives nearby.

50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'

So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.

There are a lot of reasons to love this picture, redux

But one of them is that you can really see the kid visualizing the truck going over a landscape of strangely human, undulating hillsides. It's the sort of powerful imaginative visualization I remember from the long hours I endured being unsuccessfully catholicated as a child, which I spent pretending my hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match. That's why Italians talk with their hands, you know. It's because of all the time we spent pretending our hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match in church, while the priest blah blah blahs about crap we obviously pay the closest possible attention to, considering our 'perilously' low birth rate and the sort of revolting, hypocritical adulterous pigs we elect into highest office. And, of course, our ongoing Christlike attachment to the merciful and forgiving spirit of Fascism.

God, I love Picture Is Unrelated so much.

Speaking of Catholics, more Chaser:

The limits of the zoological approach, redux

Today's the anniversary of Dutroux being sentenced. It chills my blood, that case, that Nihoul is already back on the streets, that Dossier X was let slide the way it was . . . This country chills my blood. There's charm in surrealism, but the surrealism here is more late Goya than the Marvellous Adventures of Amelie Fucking Poulain, that's for sure. The Lie Gaenen thing tipped me over the edge, that demonstrated a little too aptly the tolerance in this legal establishment for recidivist paedophilia despite all that street-hitting over Dutroux. The king (himself accused of paedophilia in the 70's) has apparently rejected his demand for clemency, but nobody knows if the public prosecutor has actually done its job and got him into prison yet to serve the 2/3 of his sentence that recidivist paedophiles are obliged to serve here (he was already condemned for paedophilia in the 70's, and then went on to have a successful career as a children's author and television presenter).

Well, it's not just paedophilia, there's a lack of proportionate consequences for actions generally speaking that allows the proverbially stupid national spirit flourish. Everybody complains about the wild-boars-on-the-rampage traffic and everbody drives around drunk, but what can you expect when there are no traffic cops and no penalties for drunk driving? I've got an acquaintance here who got pissed, totalled his car in a busy downtown tunnel, waited for the cops to come, they didn't breathalyze him and the whole problem went away. Why not? Nobody got hurt, miraculously; he was insured, the insurance company paid, because in the official documents he wasn't drunk. Simpler for everyone.

Especially because anybody here who gets a prison sentence under three years doesn't have to go to prison, they're too crowded. The F-word mentioned the other day that he'd like to teach in a prison, rather than a private school, which is a sentiment I can understand but I got rather insistent he not do it here, where they're over-crowded in a hellish manner and apparently you have to be the bastard of all time to actually get sent there if it takes that long to get a recidivist paedophile in. But my guess is that if Gaenen'd been a Maghrebin paedophile they'd have scraped together some room. Jamioulx in Charleroi is 50% over capacity, more depending on the source, and apparently with the latest wave of inmates coming in they had to stick a bunch directly into the tank - 2.5mX4.5m rooms without a window and just a concrete slab for a bed . . .

And how are they dealing with the situation at the administrative level here? Paying the Netherlands Euro 30 million to take 500 prisoners off their hands. Because the Netherlands doesn't have enough crime so they've got all these jails sitting around empty. Fucking embarassing.

A word about elections, sour grapes, and conclusion-jumping

Robert Fisk knows rather more about Iran than I do, he's actually there and reporting at the moment, and has written about it extensively over the last few days, so instead of going on about it more than I'm already going to I'll link him and use a quote he quotes in one of his articles:

"The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad. You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad's supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad."

Arlopop wrote a point-by-point description of why we should question the Iranian results, and while I think he can find most of his answers in the Fisk or the Cockburn in the same paper, I'd like to go over them briefly here. Let's start with majority-Kurd provinces. How could they have swung so Ahmadinejady? Maybe because the comparison of the Kurdish areas to San Francisco-going-McCain is almost offensive. I've never been to either but I'm sure the Kurdish areas of Iran aren't San Fran-fucking-cisco, they're places where people are still operating at the subsistence level and a bad winter kills you, and one of the regions where billions of dollars of massively inflated oil revenues were, according to any proper economist, thrown around like some particularly irresponsible candy since the 2005 elections.

And 'curious election results on the day'? A bit of Voter's-News-Service-2000? I'm aware saying the same thing happened in the States in 2000 isn't likely to persuade 49 to 51% of Americans that the latest Iranian one wasn't a steal; I am saying that this isn't a particularly uncommon thing to have happen. In a similar vein, Arlopop listed other objections that aren't strictly anecdotal or likely to be the actions of a large, impassioned minority of people deeply unhappy about the way the wind was blowing. The thing is, "apart from the fact that the Ahmadi was declared the winner before the votes were counted. apart from the fact that by law Khameni is not to receive the certification from the election commission until the third day following the election and only then can he approve and announce the winner, yet he did so within 24 hrs, apart from the remarkable election result graph that shows a preposterously straight line rise in the votes counted for Ahmadi" - these aren't really bizarre things to have happen if the man was actually leading by around 30%.

If I seemed to 'concede' in a recent post that that Ahmadinejad was less popular in urban areas than rural ones, I didn't mean to. My understanding is that he's unpopular with middle-class urbanites, and Tehran isn't peopled exclusively with middle-class urbanites. Once more, we're not talking about San Fran-fucking-cisco. Ahmadinejad got his big start being the mayor of Tehran, and he's spent the last five years subsidizing people who were being priced out of the Tehranese real estate market (in part because of his own economic policies, but there you are, if most Iranians aren't capable of appreciating economic cause and effect, they can join a club that includes everybody else in the fucking world).

As for generational shifts, he's also spent the last five years subsidizing the young. Why would we assume - especially now, during an international economic crisis that most of the world believes was caused by excessive economic liberalism - why would we assume the generational shift would be away from his managed-economy, high-subsidy side of the spectrum? Especially while there's a 40% unemployment rate?

And if their pre-occupation was peace, why assume Ahmadinejad would be a repellent candidate? Sigh. I'm already trying to avoid offending my own feminist sensibilities by appearing to defend Ahmadinejad, who I think is a cunt; I don't want to start appearing to defend nuclear weapons in the same day. Nonetheless, here're eight little words the young Iranians I went to school with in Paris five or six years ago quoted at me when I asked why the idea of getting nuclear weapons was so popular with them: Iraq, North Korea, 2003, invasion and lack thereof. And then two more: Israeli arsenal. I don't know, but I expect the road to peace looks different when you're a defensive country that actually has a reason to be defensive.

And anybody who would imagine that Iranians would be feeling any less defensive now than they were in 2005, now that someone who made Sharon look like Bambi has his finger on the button, needs to look at a fucking map (not to mention to stop thinking about Obama as a bouquet of roses they can hand the world to apologize for decades of fuck-ups, and to start thinking about him as their own president - but more on that below.) The US is important, sure. It's not where the Iranians I knew were expecting the planes to come from and it's not a geographically small and militarily enormous enemy Iranian strategists would hope to be able to neutralize with the threat of four or five well-shot missiles. Not my cup of strategic tea, but again - if Iranian strategists aren't capable of appreciating the conflict between nuclear armaments and an honest desire for peace, they can join a club that includes just about all the other strategists in the fucking world.

Now, I don't think we're looking at anything in Iran in the protests that could be called sour grapes or sore losing. I think people who want Ahmadinejad gone have the right ideology. I don't like him. I like their right to protest. But look at these two pictures:

Half a million people turn out to protest America's involvement in Indochina, 1971. Then, in 1972, incumbent Nixon beats pacifist McGovern by an embarassing margin, even with the start of the Watergate scandal.

May and June 1968 - a huge chunk of France goes apeshit left, making American peacenik demonstrators look like the spineless bourgeois potheads they turned out to be. Later in June, in the French legislatives President De Gaulle calls to calm everybody down, the rightwing parties clean up nearly 58% of the vote.

Hundreds of thousands of people hitting the streets is evidence something is wrong. But mass demonstrations are not in themselves a sign that the majority isn't being represented.

But look - it's always questionable, right? Arlopop could just as easily ask, why shouldn't we question the Iranian results? They are questionable, even beyond questions of fixing after the fact. The tactics leading up to the election persuading people which way to vote were lousy, Ahmadinejad is a populist to an irresponsible degree, and it's a shame he won - legitimately or not - because if he hadn't won it would have been much simpler to deal with for the rest of the world. Questionable, on all sorts of levels. No less questionable for the questions being common to most democratic systems. And most questionable of all because it's impossible for us to know. We're not Iranian, we weren't there, we didn't count the votes, we didn't see what happened in the counting stations, we didn't have observers there.

Questioning is fine. But there's a difference between questioning and a wholesale leap to the conclusion that the demonstrators represent the Iranian majority and that Ahmadinejad's election was a steal. And let's not leap the other way - for the moment, let's forget similar massive demonstrations in 1953 and the CIA and Iranian government paranoia about how this is the first internet age Yankee-sponsored right-wing coup. Let's think about what we do know - ourselves, us Anglos, now.

Let's look at the fact that international Anglo opinion-leading media outlets like the Economist are already making absolutely unprovable, unqualified statements like "most Iranians believe electoral fraud has occurred on a massive scale", that Republicans are frothing at the mouth for some sort of intervention in favour of Moussavi, that in mainstream American media Moussavi supporters are demonstrating for a wholesale structural change from the Ayatollahs on down - and ask ourselves how this Anglo certainty, this transformation of we don't know into almost definitely, is going to do to the tightrope being trod in the region as Obama seeks to transform the US's fucking lamentable role there. The Financial Times actually has a rather smashing article about it.

Questioning is fine. Questioning is always fine. Anglos and westerners conclusion-jumping en masse in a way that is so illegitimizing is not. Unfortunately it's already been done, and done before we know shit about shit except that a few hundred thousand Iranians are monumentally pissed off and that they're being governed by the sort of murderous thugs governing most of the human population of the world, functioning democracies or not. And now Barack Obama is going to have an exponentially harder time engaging diplomatically with an Iranian regime who millions of his own electorate are being convinced is illegitimate. That's just fucking dandy, and I really have to ask: who is going to be happy about that?

There are a lot of things to love about this photograph

But one of them is certainly that Jayne Mansfield had an IQ topping out 160. Quantifiably measurable genius is what quantifiably measurable genius does and off the chart or not, based on this photograph alone I know I'd rather give Sophia Loren the keys, and I mean that with almost every permutation of significance and taste you can imagine. Still, I wish it was in colour.

Speaking of Sophia Loren, more Chaser:

Given the history of US and Iranian relations . . .

So considering what's happened with Iran, the US, and regime change over the last 40 years, I was rather relieved to read this this morning. It's really fantastic that people are demonstrating there for what they believe in, in the face of a repressive security apparatus. It's really awful that the repressive security apparatus is being repressive. And if there were irregularities or corruptions in the voting patterns, I really hope they're exposed and dealt with. But take a deep fucking breath.

The percentage Ahmadinejad's supposed to have got this time - low 60%'s - is about the same as he was supposed to have got in 2005 without raising eyebrows. That was in the second round, true - but his opponent in the second round wasn't a 'reformist', he was another conservative. A reformist candidate came third in 2005, just topping out 17% of the vote. 'Reformers' performed worse in the last election, without everybody screaming foul.

We've known for a long time that educated urbanites in Iran thought Ahmadinejad's a dangerous hick and that everybody else there rather liked him. And now he's spent the last five years offering politically popular subsidies to the bulk of the population against any rational economic advice. When they've caused piss-off, his domestic policies have mainly pissed off middle-class urbanites - not really the bulk of the electorate. And his posturing on Iran's nuclear programme hasn't resulted in the disasters people warn about yet, and indeed surely Iranians have remarked that without Ahmadinejad tempering his speech, the US has nonetheless voted for the man who didn't sing 'bomb bomb Iran', and whose administration has spent the last few months indicating it's interested in a better relationship.

Based on what we know - why would we assume that now, in 2009, it's impossible for Ahmadinejad to get the votes he got in 2005? Why would we assume there has been a 30% + shift in voting patterns that has been fraudulently covered up, just because the educated urbanites who are sick of the dangerous hick - and yeah, he's a dangerous hick - are bravely and efficiently hitting the streets? Why are we assuming so readily that democracy has failed, instead of asking if the demonstrators are just extremely disappointed about the way democracy has gone? Why are so many Americans assuming that just because they managed to vote for the least embarassing candidate for once last year, every other country is going to start doing the same?

I'm very, very sorry people are getting killed, and apparently getting disappeared into the bargain, and that it's a big fucking mess. Election or not, this government, like so many Iranian governments before it, bears the responsibility for murder. But look - this is a country where, 45 years ago, democracy was snuffed out - with a great deal of international help - under the guise of massive protests. This was followed by a quarter of a century of extremely repressive absolutist rule and massive international resource exploitation. The revolution that ended the situation in 1979 was attacked with both barrels by the international community, up to and including arming a thug like Saddam Hussein to the teeth to fight a brutal proxy war.

Morally revolting or not, it's not a surprise that the government is trigger-happy now. History and our common sense has to tell us there's a very real prospect that the election results were legitimate, and that it wouldn't take a paranoid schizophrenic government to imagine that the massive anti-government demonstrations represent yet another internationally-sponsored, anti-democratic coup attempt. Is murdering and disappearing the right way to deal with that? No. It's an awful way to deal with that. But - given the history of US and Iranian relations - I understand why it's being dealt with this way. Tragic. But there you are. You spend forty years fucking a country, and what have you got? A fucked country.

Obama knows what he's talking about, which I'm really not used to thinking about things American presidents say. I hope he means it.

Talking shop

This post is a post of praise about my home and natal land. Oh yes . . . Canada. The national police may be taser-happy goons and the city police may be mind-bogglingly incompetent and the situation with the natives might be second in Anglo retardation and murderousness only to the fucking Australians (that charming little chestnut about driving natives out of town on extremely cold winter nights and dumping them on the side of the road to avoid dying of hypothermia as best they can comes up with monotonous and vomitous regularity), but nonetheless, when it comes to me, my job, and my relatively po-po free life - oh Canada, you big beautiful bastard.

Here's the thing. I'm putting together a feature about the Canada/EU free trade talks. Our focus is Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, so I don't talk to Canadians working for the national government much; this was the first time in more than a year. I'd forgotten how good it was. Generally, talking to national/continental government workers is my least favourite job when researching articles. Call a private company, industry organization, or local government body, and you can usually get a straight answer one way or another. But call a national government body, and sigh.

Here they are, listed by quality:

1. Sub-Saharan Africa. The best in my normal field. Everybody who picks up the phone speaks either French or English, everybody who picks up the phone is polite, helpful, and competent, and it takes a very brief time to get a cellphone number for the appropriate minister or minister's assistant or whatever. The main pitfall with calling African governments is that 3/4 of the time, the landlines just don't fucking work, and even once you get a cell number, 1/2 of the time the reception is so fucking bad the conversation sounds like a shouting match and you wrap it up understanding only about 50% of what's gone on. So the best, but still a massive pain in the ass.

And then a precipitous drop in quality as we head to:

2. Mainland Europe -national governments and EU institutions. A near impenetrable-wall of ringing phones without message services. Get past that and reach another imposing barrier of aggressive, monolingual secretaries or receptionists who have no demonstrated grasp of the fundamentals of the departments they work for, and whose mandate, very obviously, is to prevent you, as a member of the media, from speaking to anybody in their department with a title. As if that wasn't enough of a roadblock, call anytime between the hours of 11 and 15, and there's no chance of speaking to anybody whose lunches are subsidized. Call after 16, and the fuckers have all gone home.

3. The Middle East and north Africa. Complete gas factory. Combination of sub-Saharan African phone services and European monolingualism, which is a rather bigger problem for me as I don't speak Arabic but do speak a few European languages. The most frustrating port of call has been Iraq, to follow reconstruction projects wherein they were soliciting international funds with English press releases from departments where no-one willing to talk on the phone spoke English. More on that another time.

4. United Kingdom. Far and away the worst. In the case of mainland Europe and the Middle East I suspect part of the problem with getting in touch with anyone governmentally significant over the phone has to do with civil service sinecures and nepotism and the wrong jobs going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. In the UK it's rather more surreal and much, much more fucking annoying than that.

You call the media contact at the pertinent organization. The media contact never has any idea what's going on; their function, seemingly, is to try to determine the right person for you to talk to. They get back to you with punctilious efficiency, generally about three hours later, with a name and number. You call that person; not quite the right one. Lather, rinse, repeat. You call a total of no less than five people. Each one takes down your details and enquiries, and each one refers you on to someone who would no doubt be helpful who isn't, but at least everybody answers their phone.

The next day, your phone starts ringing. Everybody who you've spoken to the day before, everybody who has referred you on to someone else - everybody gets back to you. And creepily, everyone tells you the same thing - a bland, anodyne message obviously dictated by some eerie centralized intelligence that answers absolutely no questions, no matter how innocent or factual. Call the HSE with a series of questions about a spate of employee deaths and get a five-paragraph answer about how the HSE would like fewer employees to die. Call Defra with specific questions about breakdowns in the recycling chain, and get a five paragraph response about how Defra would like more things to be recycled. And get the same responses from four or five different people. You've wasted your time calling them and now they're wasting your time calling you back, refusing to engage with facts that are already part of the public domain, as if they're all scared they'll be sacked if they deviate an inch from the party line.

Ugh.

But Canada however - darling Canada. Give the trade department a holler about free trade negotiations with the EU and the media contact has an in-depth understanding of subsidization issues. I didn't speak to a single secretary yesterday, or if I did, they understood their department enough to give out information on its nuts-and-bolts operations, like the base duty rate with Most Favoured Nations and prior difficulties and roadblocks with NAFTA. Oh god, it was so good to call back home. Everybody is so polite and so much less retarded and Kafkaesque and ghost-hacked there. It lit up my whole afternoon but I won't lie to you, it also made me as homesick as fuck. Oh well.

Of gas factories and titties

Dreadfully domestic weekend. We were going to go to Lille and buy some fabric at Toto, the place where I'd dropped Euro 70 in ten minutes in Bordeaux, but there was a big cave of a shop I'd heard about here that I wanted to try before springing the Euro 10 or whatever it'd be for the train tickets, and it was the first Saturday of the organic co-op drop-off. Both the cave and the drop-off were gas factories.

While Le Berger looked like a treasure trove when I walked in, and may have been, nothing was labelled (except by price), and it's quite key that for all the projects I have in mind that we have zero polyester. I haven't been at this long enough to tell the difference by touch or sight; I tried a few burn tests on things I thought were cotton (on the sidewalk, of course, though it did strike me I could cause a jolly blaze with just a little carelessness), and they melted. And then I got sick of the whole thing. The women working there were mammoth sourpusses - too busy telling each other what a hard time they'd been having sleeping the night through recently to be able to do much more than bark single-word responses to my questions - so Toto it is. Lovely, organized, clean, labelled, cheap Toto.

The organic pick-up went rather better, and would have gone impeccably, but for, once more, half the body of the co-op being space cadets. By the time we arrived for our hamper, an insurrectionary movement was brewing, because AS WARNED REPEATEDLY some orders were missing some items that had turned out to not be available that week. The price was adjusted down, of course, in consequence, but that didn't stop ten rabble-rousers having a scene in a small basement. It took me a solid ten minutes to pay my bill instead of the three seconds it should have taken, mostly because it took that long to wade through a small lake of wounded Francophones who thought they had a right to their absent carrots. Fuck.

And - okay. I don't feel so great writing this next sentence, but here it goes. They had a blind woman on the cash till. I mean, an absolutely blind woman. Of course she was managing, because Euro-money is blind-friendly with its sizing and edges and everything, but she was managing slowly. At about the quarter of the speed of a sighted Belgian - which, you may have noticed if you've ever got change at a shop here, is about half the speed of a sighted anyone-the-fuck-else. I understand that it was more practical for her to make a contribution through money-processing than food-sorting, because of the blind-friendliness of Euro money, but she had already made a significant contribution through her organization of the electronic ordering system, so - well, I don't know. All I know is that added an extra four minutes to my time in a sweaty basement of Gallic indignation and it annoyed me.

The rest of the weekend was reasonably hitch-free. Notable was the sewing; sewed the F-word another pair of boxers because he'd liked the last pair so much, and sewed myself a dress. The dress is pretty awesome but not for me. It's shirred all around the bust, which I think is a much better look for someone who doesn't already have a big old heaving bosom; it makes me look like some sort of repellent, sexually professional child-impersonator. But I wanted to practice shirring, because it's so great for kid's clothes, so there you are. Discovered halfway through that shirring in a spiral after the garment is sewed up on the sides is definitely the way to go, much easier and much faster, though it made me a little dizzy. Next time I'll try giving shirring the titty area a miss and doing the waist instead, so as to look like a buxom pirate. Arrrr. The freedom of the unshirred boobies for me.

Crazy like a crazy person

Watched the final section of Berger's Ways of Seeing and then Robert Hughes's doc on Goya last night; just to make a week of comparative art documentaries, I suppose. The final section was on advertising, and it left me with the suspicion I like John Berger so much so far because he says things I already thought, in a much more coherent way than I could say them - notably the sheer contextual madness of paging through a magazine between pictures of dead and dying third-world types and the warm fuzziness of hard liquor ads.

That sort of thing first struck me in a big way back when I was working at the television commercial place, watching 50 or more commercials a day, one after another. Especially watching the PSAs next to the other ads - a woman with black eyes gazing imploringly at the camera in the rain, or something of the sort, when it was aiming to boost donations for shelters or encouraging men not to beat their wives - and then a beer ad suggesting all the marvellous social and sexual things that would happen to a man if he got plastered that night.

The side effect of my job - and this happened to my predecessor in the position too - was not being able to watch commercial television anymore; not only was it infuriating and awful to be inescapably confronted with the fact of audience-as-commodity, but it was like listening to the pushier kind of madman, or a cacaphony of opposing, fanatic voices. Without even changing the channel. Thank god for internet streaming sites.

Anyways, profoundly enjoyed the whole Berger series, and the Hughes Goya: Crazy Like a Genius documentary wasn't too bad either, though I vastly preferred the book. I think that's partly because when you read the book, you don't have to listen to the lecherous snide fuck speak, and can let your eyes skim over the gratuitous sentences about what he'd like to do to the Naked Maja. In his documentary about Caravaggio and in American Visions and in the Shock of the New, I swear he wasn't so consistent about forcing himself front and centre, and that they're vastly better television for it. Somehow in the book, the extended part about the visions of Goya-ghouls during the aftermath of his road injuries was less obtrusive. I think it made more sense in the broader context of a kabillion-page book rather than an hour-long or whatever it was documentary.

Ways of Being, 2

To continue from yesterday.

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.

As I wrote, it's a good point, and it's in the company of a few other good points, like how an overheated art market is transforming desired paintings into super-expensive commodities, and having a horrible impact on public galleries’ ability to collect and show. There's also a suggestion - poorly explored - of how it may be skewing instruction at art schools; something that hit my art-school alumnus boyf as extremely relevant.

BUT what we have building up to this point is an extremely personal, elitist and deeply unpleasant vision of decontextualized art and the response of masses of people to it. We have the messy, badly argued, and unlikely premise running through this documentary that the way working-class and middle-class Americans ‘experienced’ the Mona Lisa on its trip to New York in 1963 and the way they generally see gallery art is by its nature generally deeply inferior to the way Robert Hughes sees it in its proper context. Not just less educated, not just less loving, but by its nature deeply inferior - that the masses experience seeing art, and Robert Hughes looks at it. Or vice versa. Whatever verb makes Robert Hughes sound cleverer and the masses sound more insensible. I think this was a beastly, unfair, and erroneous generalization, and it’s what I hated most about the documentary.

Another thing I hated about it was the idea it presented to us that this perceived deep inferiority of the popular vision is tied to the present overheated, overpriced, and qualitatively poor state of the expensive end of the modern art market – a ridiculous, speculative art market with which only the tiniest percentage of the population has any engagement at all, and which mainly impacts them by baffling them when they go to public galleries to see something else . . .

Hughes’ perspective shows a complete unconsciousness of the importance of all the mighty piles of art vastly aesthetically and intellectually superior to shark-in-formaldehyde, that continue to be accessible and affordable in co-op or community galleries or other points of sale – points of sale that are burgeoning like mushrooms after the rain now that we have the internet. This is predictable, because the man seems incapable not only of appreciating the way the masses may or may not be impacted by art, but incapable of appreciating there may be an artistic world in existence beyond the top end he's covered in Time magazine and a series of admittedly delicious books and documentaries.

But both things I hated about the documentary can be summed up rather more simply in one phrase: Robert Hughes absolutely failed to think outside of himself.

He failed to consider that in all those thousands of people herded by the Mona Lisa in New York in the 60’s, there mightn’t have been a few hundred who saw something in it they deeply needed, making the whole exercise worthwhile; that even the frustration of being herded past something so small, so distant, so quickly could of itself be of huge importance in the artistic consciousness and education of many spectators. He failed to question if the re-contextualization of it could possibly have any value.

And by virtue of the contempt he felt for both, he was happy to put the popular experience of art in the same dependent chain of the events as Damien Fucking Hirst - when the two things are, quite obviously, only linked in antipathy. And he failed to consider that - in terms of what’s available out there in the reams of galleries and art schools and co-ops and communities - we could be living in a time that’s deeply exciting and important for the visual arts, with fine art creation de-centred and widespread as it's never been before in the western tradition. He could only see the expensive end of the market, that he's been involved with throughout his professional career.

Of these two documentaries, it’s only the raving pinko Berger who succeeded at all in exploring the recontextualization of art, not simply wailing over its decontextualization. It’s only Berger who made a real effort to go beyond himself, to leave himself behind, and engage with the perspective of the rest of people standing in front of art. So to answer yesterday's question to myself, this is why I’m left-wing. I think it’s only on this side of the political spectrum that you can think outside of yourself, that you have the framework available to help you think outside of yourself. In a sentence: I’m left-wing because I’m resisting the urge to live up my own asshole.

Anyways. We've gone on watching the rest of the Berger documentary. Episode two was about the female nude, and it was rather lovely to see an actual-real-life man engage in some feminist theorizing. But more on that later. Episode three, rather topically, was about the oil painting as a commodity or as an indicator of wealth. Plus ça change . . . what Berger's history of the oil painting illustrated was that as pissy as Hughes is with the hedge funds, diamond-encrusted skulls, and other fucking massive taste challenges currently buggering up the art world, this isn't the first time artistic time and talent has been wasted on expensive, market-driven curiosities.

Imagine if oil painters over the last 700 years had a real choice of subject, instead of languid women, Jeebus, and decadent still lives for rich clients. Imagine if all those technically superb and yet tediously repetitive academic painters had had the freedom to let their imaginations run riot. They were trained to believe they didn't, and they painted as though they didn't, and only madmen and geniuses, like the geniuses we remember and seek to look at now, managed to think beyond the spirit and market demands of their age, and create something new and eternal, even to the detriment of their pockets. Art endured and endures.

Anyways, worktime.

Ways of Being

Why be left-wing? It's a question no-one has ever bothered to ask me, either because at this point in my life I've surrounded myself with unquestioningly left-wing people, or because my interlocutors simply assume I'm left-wing because I adore marijuana. But as the freshly returned Masonic Boom has remarked, drugs and deep, macho conservatism are hardly mutually exclusive. And it's not a given that I be left-wing; it's not something I can leave unquestioned. I spent some years of my life deeply emotionally involved with someone rather to the right of Hitler, and it's not enough for me to say I didn't know while I was falling into the silken snare and didn't notice until it was too late, because I did know for some time - I'd say for a solid year - before I finally split.

Emotionally speaking, part of the reason I'm this far left at this point in my life is probably that time with Bluebird, which taught me some plain and revolting truths about what my life would become if I failed to grow a set of ideological balls. In fact, there's probably a big, complex set of emotional reasons why I'm left-wing that come from the strange cocktail of upper-middle-class inselaffen and Mussolini-lovin' guinea in my family unit, and any number of other things.

But I think the quickest, best, and most blog-friendly answer to the question - "why be left-wing?" - is for me to post these two documentaries, both worth watching: John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Robert Hughes' Mona Lisa's Curse, which both deal with the de-contextualization of art.





John Berger himself is what we call a raving fucking pinko. His documentary is simply astounding, and really not to be missed. I can't do it anything approaching descriptive and commendatory justice in the tiny amount of time I have left before I have to go to work, so let me just put it like this: he leaves himself behind, fills us with his ideas, decontextualizes art, and then recontextualizes it. It's fascinating and thorough and engaged. And it's from 1972 and looks like it cost about GBP 200 to make.

Robert Hughes - well. I love Robert Hughes, when I don't hate him; I've mentioned before that I think that Barcelona and Goya and The Shock of the New were all astoundingly good, in about the same measure I think Things I Didn't Know was one of the shittiest things I've ever read, breakfast cereal boxes and Martin Amis novels included, and The Fatal Shore a superb effort in making the fascinating painfully boring and disorganized. The Mona Lisa's Curse, an expensive-looking, slick and supremely grumpy effort that came out last year, falls on the 'hate' end of my spectrum. My first big complaint about it is that he makes excellent points about the most notorious section of the modern art market:

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.

That's marvellous, and in my estimation, true. The problem is it's a lonely little point, towards the end - it's in the company of some other good points - but the bridge to those points is rickety, weak, and deeply fucking annoying. And fuck. I'm out of time. More later.

The Green Dragon pouts, redux

I find it disquieting that the performance of the green political movement, which is now the fourth biggest block in the European parliament, has been the littlest story of this past European election in Anglo reporting here, particularly as the Anglo reporting here is British, and particularly as the Green party did remarkably well in Britain. But there it's all fuss over the BNP, BNP, BNP, who only managed to get two little measly European Parliament seats - same as the Greens - but rather more remarkably (since the two seats the Greens got were the same two seats they got in 2004), there's a fuss about the BNP getting three council seats, while the Greens got eighteen - eight up from last time. It was the fourth and fifth biggest party in the two respective elections - comfortably or far ahead of the BNP on both counts - and nobody is fucking talking about it in the papers. If you see any coverage of the green political movement in the limey press, it's about France, where the greens nearly knocked the Socialists into third place.

I was complaining about this to the F-word, and he thought it might have to do with the how headlines about all those people voting Green relative to the BNP might be a little too "Millions Of People Get On With Their Lives!" for the famously trite and sensationalistic British press to bother with. (Was it Alexei Sayle who made that gag? Rik Mayall? Hugh Laurie? Fucked if I can remember.) And he's probably right. But wading through The Making of the English Working Class as I am (thick into the Luddite bit), of course I see conspiracies everywhere, and the 'extremes' of the British press, that are quite open in their support for one or the other of the major parties, all had a little fuss about how not voting properly was going to make the BNP win - a revolting prospect, to be sure, but for fuck's sake, the BNP is just one of several small parties, and despite all the scare-mongering did worse than both the Greens and the single issue UKIP in the last elections . . .

My point is, this is Europe, not the United States, and a vote for the green party, or any other smaller party, isn't a vote flushed down the shitter. And that was clear enough to enough people that the green party did very well, including in Britain, where it gets so little airtime even relative to a bunch of raving racist loonies whose electorate seems to be made up mostly of truck drivers, skinheads, and doddering old brownshirts who can't even get girlfriends in their own ethnic group. What sort of vote could the green movement have got if it was treated seriously in the media; if there was some relationship between its degree of popularity and its degree of coverage? What if people who depend on the Telegraph and the Mirror and all that shit for their news had been informed that this party was a serious contender, that it was polling well enough that one's vote wouldn't be thrown away on it, that it was miles ahead of the BNfuckingP?

My personal hunch is that if they had been given serious coverage, we'd have seen a more seriously good result than we did. And I think the editorial boards of the papers in question probably had the same hunch. Furthermore, I think that means they're burrowing themselves a little deeper into the bin of irrelevance, because the green political movement is continuing to build strength and momentum with the motors of common sense and the new media. And people wonder why newspapers are in trouble . . .

The Green Dragon pouts through her civic duty

No big trips with my mother this weekend, because I had to vote in the Europeans on Sunday morning. It's obligatory here and I'd registered in a fit of civic duty a few weeks ago. I generally have some hesitation about voting in places that don't belong to me for whatever reason, but Jesus on His stick knows I spend enough time complaining about the special calvary that is living in Europe, and I pay a tidy chunk of taxes, though being a nom-dom not all that much, really . . . nonetheless, I voted.

Polls were open from 8h to 15h here, and on the understanding that Belgians are pathologically incapable of handling any sort of event that involves any sort of systematic processing of anything even with the benefit of five years' notice, I showed up at my local shortly after the doors opened. Well, not really my local. For some intensely annoying reason, my voting station was a twenty-minute walk from our flat, and I passed two other voting stations on the way . . . and later in the afternoon saw another up the road, rather than down, that was roughly a three-minute walk away . . . that early on a weekend morning, it makes a fucking difference. Trust me.

So grumbling I rolled up to the distant voting station at roughly 8h10 in the morning, and proceeded to wait for half an hour to vote for the green party. Actually in Francophone and Germanophone Belgium, it's called Ecolo, a rather lame name compared to the Flemish Belgian green party, the simple yet cheerful Groen!. Yes. The exclamation point is part of its name. And yes. There are two green parties in Belgium, just as there are essentially two of every party, because the Flems and the Loons will not speak each other's language, the Flems out of pride and frustration (most of them speak French reasonably well, but have an angry history with it) and the Loons out of sheer fucking pig ignorance. It is a nonsense, nonsense, stupid political and linguistic national system that makes Canada look like the Utopia of Bicultural Relations. Which it ain't.

But my point is that I waited in line for half an hour to vote for the green party. In the office itself there were five voting booths, and eight people manning the desk processing the electorate. In the half-hour that I waited, one person voted at a time. Absolute fucking gas factory. And of course it was because the desk of seven processing people (the eighth was supervising the line, making sure nobody was cutting or bribing, I suppose) only processed one person at a time.

The first person announced the electoral number of each voter. The second collected the voter's identification papers. The third and fourth crossed them off two lists, I assume one for the European and one for the civic elections, which were running concurrently and which I'm not allowed to vote in. The fifth handed the voter a magnetic card to use with the electronic voting machine. The sixth instructed the voter how to put the magnetic card into the collection box after voting, because the wrong sticker had been affixed to the slot, and the seventh handed back the voter's identification papers. But of course periodically an aged voter unused to the somewhat convoluted electronic voting process or someone who had never done it before ran into difficulties, and one of the processing people would have to rush to the booth and help them, which would jam up the works completely for the duration.

Sigh.

At least I got out of there in half an hour. Later in the day when Mum and I were out and about, we saw lines at the different voting stations stretching far out onto the streets, including in the Grande Place, which all the tourists were fascinated by. And that on one of the most wretchedly cold and wet June 7ths I've seen in my thirty years of existence. Geez, as they say, Louise. Nonetheless today I'm pleased about how it all went. The green political movement boosted its showing across Europe and here in Belgium. The continent is going a little too fascist and apathetic these days for the mighty greenwash I was hoping for, but considering everything else that wasn't right-wing went to pot I guess it's the best one can hope for in a bullocksy situation.

Duct tape me down

Holy shit . . . if this works, I'm about to have a dressmaker's dummy. Sweet. Sweet. Sweeeeet.

The Mater is coming to visit this afternoon for the weekend, on her way to good old Perfidious Albion. I'm pleased, but our apartment is absolutely filthy. You know, in recent weeks I've been thinking about my family and considering the possibility of blaming them more for my problems. This is something the F-word rides me for occasionally - thinking everything in the world is my fault, which he feels is unhelpful and a form of rampant, unfun egoism. I blame the Mater for that becase she does the same thing. Hah! Success. Also I'm going to blame them for my being a pig, and for the apartment not being clean enough for her visit. Hah! Double success.

I could get used to nothing being my fault . . .

In other news, my favourite Australian show, the Chaser's War on Everything, has been pulled off the air for two weeks due to a particularly tasteless sketch about dying children. I agree that it wasn't awfully funny or topical, rather amateurish actually - except for the Zac Efron part, which had me galumphing with laughter. Judge for yourself:



This is from the same men who showed me why I have to move to Australia: their nationally funded channel (their equivalent of the BBC) paid Craig Reucassel to say "Australia . . . it shits all over everywhere else" to tourists.

Don't ask any questions

This is the best thing in the world. I feel sorry for children who didn't have Sesame Street.



I guess they had good shit in Britain too, but only Sesame Street is Sesame Street. Who else ever combined black marketeering and illustrating the difference between O's close-mid back rounded sound and the open back rounded sound? In one brief song, they teach you how to speak, spell, and traffic. Three of the most useful things in the world.

I think about that sometimes, you know. With the economic climate being what it is at the moment, with me living on a continent where organized crime has such massive economic dominance. How long before the black market becomes not only dominant, but indispensable? How long before credit problems cause production to slip below consumption, or seem to? My guess is that when taxes are hiked like crazy to pay off the extra-big deficits major governments are running up at the moment as they go a little bail-out crazy, it's going to blossom like a flower. Like in the post-war period here. My guess is that governments will make an effort - a more politically acceptable effort - to recoup their losses by taxing corporations more carefully, and well they should. And then the price of everything will go up - and people will realize they can run an economy more cheaply by themselves, selling things back and forth in cash - and manufacturers will tear a page out of the tobacco companies' books, and find clever and illegal ways to sell things off-book.

It will be a new golden age of crime. But instead of the golden age that just ended - where company management was able to persuade shareholders to pay them massive bribes for just not leaving or breaking confidentiality, when we lived in a blackmail economy; when products were unsafe, poorly regulated and irresponsibly flogged for the sake of share price and government complicity - it will be scroungy and dangerous in a different way, which is much more visibly annoying, especially to a population already rightly fed up to the teeth with manufacturers. And then when people get annoyed enough, the strong men will come, and after them - if there is an "after them" in the nuclear age - what? Perhaps a new, stupid, sickening version of freedom which is actually just a relaxation of any regulatory financial law - just a big corporate free-for-all that rewards utter incompetence as long as it has an MBA, like what has just imploded.

You read it here first. Now do you understand why I want to move to an isolated commune in Australia? Hopefully we can choose the right strong men.

Would you like to buy an O, round and neat . . . a nearly perfect circle, tidy and complete?

It smokes, it drinks, it philosophizes . . .

Old impending-doomy feeling is back. I don't know if it was that Air France thing, which is basically an example of my worst or strongest nightmare, or all the film noir we've been watching or the fact that the weather has been encouraging the idea in me that it is summer, but I'm perpetually incapable of carpe dieming and thus am living in fear the sun will once more be snatched away from me and leave me as summerless as I've been since leaving Canada. The idea of Australia in the circumstances is a little like heaven; I don't know anything about it except that where we're thinking of is as warm in the winter as it is here now, and that's enough to make up my mind for me.

Summer. Could it really be summer?

Watched a really funny movie last night: Beat the Devil, that Truman Capote participated in writing. A few real laugh-out-loud moments. The bit where O'Hara offered a critique of Maria Dannreuther's portrait had us howling and quoting at each other all night, trying to get that creepy, crawly Ren-from-Ren-and-Stimpy voice down. Some great characters and performances, but I wonder how Truman Capote was with writing women. The lead blonde may as well have been Holly Golightly airdropped in from Manhattan. Maria Dannreuther was fine, though, and all of the men characters were great. Rather funny to see Humphrey Bogart being funny - funnier than in The African Queen.

They make it so easy

I won't lie to you. Another reason La New Yorkaise and I are such good buddies is that we both understand what it's like to live in Paris. The difference is I was out of that place in about 3.1 years, departing definitively (the thesis defense, the odd visit aside) roughly three hours after my final exam - drunk off my tits and weeping with relief in Canada about ten hours later. And she - she got married to a local. Now I'm as I am - you can make up your mind about the degree of sanity I'm in possession of - and that poor girl, who's got another year to go on top of her 7.5, is both auto and medically medicating like crazy to keep it together. I think she's coming through it all quite well, considering I'd have gone on a killing spree by now if I was her. But she'll be fixing the damage for years to come.

Now obviously, la New Yorkaise is a city mouse, and though I grew up in the middle of nowhere I made the transition to London and then a bunch of other great big cities when I was eighteen. She is not a yokel, and as hard as I try, I'm not either. We understand big cities. We understand people are stressed there, there to work, maybe thinking transitory thoughts; things are rarely as clean or safe as they should be, once you cross the European Teutonic lines, and all in all there are some challenges. But Paris is special. Paris is a city full of locals who are unremittingly negative, and have been since they were children. Paris is a city where the people who save their tears for their pillows are the cheerful ones. Paris is a place where locals get their jollies from shitting all over everything else. It is the European post-colonial city; the population has been frozen into pride by the glories of its past, to the degree it has to frown on cultural innovations from its former rivals and from its former colonies, but also cornered by the cold economic realities of its present, which in many ways are the bleakest I've ever seen - you could make a good argument for Italian cities having bleaker economic realities, but at least people give each other compliments there. What little joy going through that repellent school system leaves an individual is ground out of your typical Parisian by their dysfunctional gender relations. It is an unpleasant place.

A mere five years on from my departure and the only people I'm still in touch with from that 3.1 years of my life are other foreigners who are living or who still live there, and a few French from other parts of the country, and I'm glad. There are a few Parisians I feel, sometimes, that I should like to see and talk to again, but any time I think I may be starting to miss them, my mind clicks forward and shows me how suffocating, negative and depressing the conversations will go. It's sad.

I understand these days better than I ever have that France isn't Paris - that people in and from the south, especially, are beautifully warm and enthusiastic, while still maintaining a strong edge of bluntness. The problem is that the French government is absolutely centralized in Paris, and French politicians tend to be educated in Paris, every time those fucking cockwanks make goddamn assholes of themselves, it's classic Parisian bullshit. Toady up to whoever's most powerful like a fucking whore, and minimize or forget the contribution of everybody else.

You know, best of luck to Obama with that international nuclear disarmament initiative. But this morning, I'm sort of glad to know that if we ever do have another world war, the capital of France will be obliterated in a nuclear holocaust long before the young men from my country are even thinking about being called upon to descend on the country's northern beaches and die in their thousands. Those fucking grande ecole-educated masturbators are so far up their own stinking shit-chutes that they'd try once more to forget it within a generation. The willful ignorance of people educated so intensively and expensively is truly vomit-worthy. Fuck'em.

With a comical look on his face

I had a nice weekend with La New Yorkaise visiting, and truly buried the reefer wagon with a trip to warm, sunny Maastricht. The sun was shining and I was high and cheerful the whole time. We watched The Great Escape again early Sunday morning and I liked it even better the second time - and part of the reason La New Yorkaise and I are such close buddies is because of things like both understanding Charles Bronson was one of the most magnificent pieces of ass to walk the earth; a fact bizarrely lost on most women these days. In hot relief in The Great Escape; wifebeater, long underwear, emotional vulnerability and lots of dirt. Sweet. Throw me over your horsy's saddle and take me away from all this, you beautiful Tatar man. The rowboat also works for the fantasy file.

My point is that nice as a weekend as it was, now it all feels like it was leading up to last night, returning here after getting La New Yorkaise on the TGV back to Paris, curling up with the F-word, and watching Casablanca for the first time. I'd insisted we give it a watch, not because I expected it to be stupendous, but because it's such a big cultural reference point, and it was a hole in our education, that we'd seen dozens of things spoofing off it but never the it itself.

Holy shit. That's the best movie ever.

The storyline had me weeping like a tile, and you may put that down to my femininity if you like. But you'd be foolish, because aside from all the lovey-doveyness it was well evocative of a city full of desperate people, and absolutely absorbing - absolutely good. The writing was just jaw-dropping and those lines that people refer to ad nauseum are referred to ad nauseum for a reason. In context they're fucking brilliant. For me the best one was when Ilsa came back to the bar the first time when Rick was drunk and he got pissy with her. That has to be the greatest sequence of pissiness ever captured on celluloid. "Or aren't you the kind that tells?" Oh, sweet.

And the look, the noir and all those shadows and all those great shots, right from the pan into Sam leaning back and singing to everybody - it looked so good. The actors looked so good. Humphrey Bogart, that piece of battered driftwood, was perfect for Rick, and Ingrid Bergman was scrumptiously beautiful. The F-word pointed out what La New Yorkaise and I had been discussing that morning in reference to Charles Bronson - her face isn't vapid enough for her to be a famous beauty now. She had a big nose and strong features and a funny face shape, and while it all came together into this really remarkable and flawless beauty - that incredibly Scandinavian beauty - it would perhaps be much harder for her to get proper professional recognition for that perfect beauty now.

Scarlett Johansson, the Swede currently massaging the dreams of a generation of young men with that lovely rack, has such a docile little girly face, and even the notoriously beautiful Anglo actresses who aren't white and should be subject to different measurements of loveliness - Frieda Pinto, Halle Berry, for examples - all have butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth chewing gum commercial, boring boring girly faces. The only interestingly beautiful faces I can think of in American movies come from Spain or Latin America - Javier Bardem, Benecio del Toro or something, and Salma Hayek - now those are some real faces. I guess there's hope yet.