You've been smelling again

It actually smells like autumn. Well, fuck me. Thanks for making it easy to quit you, Europe, going fucking autumn in early August, you frigid bitch. I'm really starting to feel like the hapless half of a relationship, in a sort of situation where Europe has been passively-agressively forcing me to break up with her because she doesn't have the balls to dump me herself, by, for example, revoking Brits' rights to live and work in the Schengen area, or by learning English so that she can do my job herself. Well, fuck you too, you evil cow, I'm going to go spend the rest of my life banging your much hotter daughter Australia.

All of which is a way to say I can bear the atrocious summer, one of the worst summers I've passed in Belgium, weather-wise, though the competition from 2009, 2008 and 2007 was all pretty stiff (motherfuck, I've been here awhile), because it doesn't matter, since I won't have to bear the winter. With that in mind, I quite like that it smells like autumn - that it smells like that clean and vigourous natural scrubdown after the sharp rain. I wish I could bottle that essence as a perfume; there must be a way, because surely it must be a thing I'm smelling when I think I'm smelling the clean - must be some sort of mushroom that actually manages to smell like clean. Right? I don't know.

But it's almost like sniffing an emotion of transcending hope and joy and I'll miss it awfully if I can't have it any more in the Antipodes. But the F-word says I can still smell it in Australia because it's not actually autumn I'm smelling, it's the post-rain, and they will have rather a lot where we are going; lots of cracking great thunderstorms. Probably it'll be even sharper and sweeter, since the breaking of the heat by the rain will be far more dramatic.

Oh good lord, it's just occurred to me that I have no idea what it's going to smell like there. I was already getting dizzy with anticipation just thinking about what the birds and the fruit is going to be like there. Goodness gracious me.

Does this look sexual to you?

Very nice weekend, this past weekend was. How long ago it seems. Things used to be easier in terms of swapping continents, you know. Now that I have money and possessions and a cat it's much harder . . . between that and work and the normal fuckery of Belgian existence I feel like the two days intervening since the weekend have fried my brains like so many little peices of sweetmeats.

We watched a movie called Secretary with Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. I've got a massive boner for James Spader's voice, which alone makes him one of nature's own peices of ass. Wikipedia says he used to be a yoga instructor. Can you imagine how much pussy he would have got as a yoga instructor with that voice? Not to mention business; I'm firmly against yoga in many ways but I'd show up and pay money to be told to be bendy in that voice. He must have had a vocation to be an actor, because it couldn't have been for the pussy, because that would have been vast available quantities of yogic pussy. Anyways, he was a big part of the charm of Secretary; because even with that patchouli honeysuckle voice to one side James Spader brings a lot of sort of attractive humanity to neurotic pervert roles, and with that voice he's phenomenally well-suited to be the pants in a spanky romance.

But I must say the main charm of Secretary was Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was just smashing. Really awfully good. Which was refreshing, as just the week previously I'd hit a blank when I'd tried to think of any Anglo actress under 40 who didn't annoy the piss out of me.

I also appreciated the attempt - though I don't think the movie quite succeeded, it succeeded further than any other I can think of, as they were all erotic thrillers and hence something Americans are even worse at than romantic comedies - and Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance really helped bring a degree of naturalness - to present a dominant/submissive relationship as not perverted. The only thing holding it back was the slightest sense of a carefully affirming after-school special. Maybe the ending was a little too happy. Oh yeah . . . spoiler . . . hah hah. Sorry, there's my inner sadist coming out. Or else it needed more male frontal nudity. Or could have been the treacle soundtrack. Hard to say.

Anyways, it was also interesting as we watched it at a time where I had been thinking about domination and submission in a broader context. I'd never imagine you can come to any grand sweeping conclusions about humanity in terms of whether they'd rather spank or be spanked but it's certainly one of the continuums that makes up the dizzying array of continuums that makes us all so odd. And the special thing about this continuum is that I have a feeling it's less linear than most - that part of playing with this aspect of your personality (above and beyond it as an aspect of your sexuality) means an awareness of and occasional leaps to what seems like the opposite, polar end of the continuum.

There's a range of public behaviours I don't think people would commit, a range of tolerations and obediences I don't think they'd have, if this sort of bedroom behaviour wasn't part of a wider approach to the world. And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I guess it's just a thing. But I can't help but feel that as much of it should be restrained to the bedroom as possible, because there's a good chance the rest of the world you're submitting to your games really isn't interested in playing.

Auf Wiedersehen, Deutschland

You know, I honestly think I'm going to miss Germany more than Belgium. Seems strange but of course it's not strange at all, as Germany has been nothing but the scene of a series of pleasant holidays, undemanding, over-subsidized conferences and escapist weekends, all healthily soaked in reinheitsgebot beer. Whereas Belgium has been the scene of all of my travails and an embarassing abundance of incidences of alcohol poisoning as I kept refusing to understand the sugary, extremely strong beer was not intended to be drunk in the sort of quantities I'd previously considered satisfying. And we've been going to what is apparently one of the least charming bits of Germany at that - Dusseldorf - a sterile yuppie town, they say. Well, maybe considering how damn filthy Brussels is, the sterility was more welcome than it otherwise would have been.

We went to Dusseldorf last weekend - probably for the last time, as our friends there are likely to move to Brazil before the F-word and I can afford jaunts back to Europe, and when we make a jaunt back to Germany no doubt we'll prioritize and spend our time somewhere awesome like Berlin. That makes me a little sad. There are lots of nice things about yuppie towns, one of which is the fucking awesome international richness of their cuisine, and when those yuppie towns are in Germany there's the pleasant corollary of them not being overpriced. We had tapas and it was grand but we could have had any number of other things there and it would have been grand. Mind you the food in Berlin is fucking awesome too.

We also went to the track, which got old - I'd been expecting the vast and delicious buffets they offer in North American racetracks to keep the punters in - and we went to a couple of open air concerts in the Hofgarten, the memorable one of which was Oquestrada, a nice Portuguese band with a lot of flavours. You can listen here.

Not much else that's fit for print today. We saw Wolfman last night, a film I'd been excited about seeing. I know I don't read entertainment magazines or anything but I'm really shocked I hadn't heard about how bad it was. Not just garden variety bad, either, it was really atrocious. I've never borne witness to such a revolting waste of a big budget, fantastic acting talent, and concept, via an excruciatingly poor script and really indifferent direction. And what makes me angriest, I think, despite all the love I've got for Benecio del Toro, Hugo Weaving and good scripts, is the waste of a concept. I mean, fucking werewolves, they're awesome. And now that that turkey has came out and been all shitty, nobody's going to make another big-budget werewolf movie for a decade or two. Fuck.

OHMIGOD

I'm legal for Australia. I cannot believe how fast and effeciently my application was processed. I am composing not so much a prayer as a paean of gratitude, pre-emptively, and perhaps my expectations are too high, which so far runs a little like this:

Dear Australia,

Thank you for not getting on my tits all the goddamn time, like some countries I could name.
Thank you for welcoming this poor huddled mass of hyper-educated middle class Caucasian woman despite the interesting conviction of some of you have that the country's all full up,
And once more, thank you for not getting on my tits.

Yours,

Mistress La Spliffe

I plan to recite it every morning.

But just in case you think I might have gone soft, here's my first sweeping complaining-type generalization about Australians: I have yet to meet one who knows how to use a comma (maybe over-influenced in a literary sense by Ned Kelly?). But frankly at this point I don't care so it doesn't really count as a complaint. They could just jettison punctuation completely if it doesn't stop them from being as awesomely effecient as they are relative to the people among whom I've been living for the last three and a half years. Nevertheless it's been remarkable.

The Shoddyssey part III

I've just realized I've got something like 10 weeks before we leave Brussels. Obviously in one way that's an extremely happy thought; but in another, nuts-and-bolts short-term sort of way, it's like this place is putting me through an extended exit hazing in terms of all the absolute bullshit I have to go through with with taxation, local and utilities authorities just to put this scaphic pond behind me. Whenever a suspicion creeps in that I might miss this place, some new incidence of idiocy rolls out.

And this week it has been contrasted painfully - sweet-bitterly, because the potential future sweet is rather more dominant than the transient bitterness - with the utter competence of the Australian authorities. There have actually been a few examples thereof in the last few days, but here's the most remarkable: the F-word called the Australian taxation office to reconcile some old charge. The first thing they did was offer to call him back, since it was an international call. The second thing they did was patch him straight through to the person who could help him, who did - within five minutes the issue was rectified AND he got guidance on what to do when he gets home.

In the meantime, I'm contrasting this with the pie-eyed idiocy and utter fucking runaround I've got from moronic Wallonian public servants over getting my tax refund, which has been pending since fucking April . . . luckily the HR manager took pity on me and that's being sorted by our accountants, or something.

I've decided to try to deal with the rest of the bullshit that crops up by always choosing the Flemish language option when calling large institutions and trusting that they'll speak English, because honestly, three years in this place has left me convinced that the only reason it doesn't sink into the sea is because the Flemish are holding its head above the water. I don't know what's wrong with the Wallonian school system that it creates such a quantity of myopic, bovine, lumpish idiots with which the country's civil services have been burdened.

And I really hesitate to approach the Flems in this fashion . . . it feels really disrespectful to call people up and ask them to speak in another language in their own country. But I've been driven to it by fucking years of dealing with these Frankish dolts.

Anyways, another painful point of comparison between where we're going in Australia (this district) and Brussels is that it's fucking winter there, and the middle of summer here, and the weather is still better than it is here. Adjectives of disgust fail me.

These years in the wettest, moldiest parts of northern Europe have left me with a mighty revulsion for those human traits that have left us incapable of controlling our violent and acquisitive urges sufficiently to all live in harmony in the subtropics. No; instead we're a race of jerk-offs, who have hounded each other to the degree that uninhabitable temperate rainforests, which is certainly what Belgium must have been before being burdened by Belgians, have provided a sodden recourse for entire civilizations.

Anyways.

All else is going well or badly, depending on whether it involves Belgians or not. My visa case officer has all my papers and is processing them, now that the Mounties have came through; she's suggested it'll be another month. The darling woman got in touch with me the day after she got back from vacation; if she was Belgian . . . well, luckily she's not.

Work would like me to spend a week transiting in Singapore to get to know some people there; that's fine with me as we wanted a transit week anyways, and I have a feeling the food and the botanical garden will be superb.

Also I need the nice gentle introduction to Asia that Singapore is reputed to be. Shanghai didn't really count because I was staying at the Four Seasons, which was like a Four Seasons anywhere, except with better food. I have a feeling that in the coming years I'll be eating great quantities of mind-bendingly delicious food, to the degree that the wonton soup they serve in the lobby there will seem utterly plain and uninteresting. But nevertheless I'll never forget it; just at the moment I needed wonton soup the most, there it was, fucking deliciously, after a near-total desert of anything even vaguely Asian in my diet for the previous three years . . .

With the cat, I don't know where things are at. The vet - Wallonian of course - went on holiday after leaving me in the dark about the fate of her blood samples, so the whole process is basically at a stand-still until the end of next week. That's bothering me.

And everything else ticks by . . . slowly but surely.

I only count one Belisarius

Reading Count Belisarius. Almost none of the magic of I, Claudius. I suspect Graves was eating fewer magic mushrooms during its composition, or had eaten too many in previous years. Or possibly I, Claudius was better because Claudius's narrative voice fit in more naturally with Graves' standard narrative voice. I don't know, I think I'll need to read a few more of Graves' novels to be sure. It's not like Count Belisarius is crappy or anything. Good fight scenes, certainly.

Briefly talked with Rodelinda this past weekend, while she visited and amidst dozens of other things, about how I was sort of scared that one day I'd run out of good books to read. Now that I've read Middlemarch suddenly the world of literature looks finite in a way it never did before. She pointed out, in her erudite way, that that was stupid thing to be afraid of. I hope so. I just fucking hate getting stuck with a crappy book; it's like having sex with a stupid man.

You wait and you wait and you wait and you wait

The ginger beer is coming along beautifully - bizarrely so. I kept a jar apart from the main bottlage to test as it goes along. My only concern is that it was already delicious and delicately effervescent on Monday night after bottling it Monday morning, and it's not supposed to be ready for two weeks. But it's hard to see how it can get any nicer, although it's still a little too sweet, which I guess will go away as the ginger bug works its magic. I'm concerned that it'll taste yeasty instead. We'll see. The waiting is the hardest thing.

Anyways, it's still in progress and so is the second round of kim chi, but I think I can start to go out on a limb and say Wild Fermentation is ace.

Sometimes I wonder if Nick Cave ever gets tired of being so awesome. But what could he do, at this point? Pick his nose and eat it? Fine. He could be a nose-mining snot-eater, be as big a shithead as the Gauguin figure in The Moon and Sixpence, enjoy the novels of Ayn Rand, cover it all in an anorak, and still remind us he's the awesomest pipol person in circulation with a double play of the a capella "Black Betty" from Kicking Against the Pricks and his narration of The Cat Piano:



Oh, how I wish normal Australians actually sounded like that, it would make my post-this-October life so much more pleasant. It's all enough to reconcile me to "Brompton Oratory". Although actually I think "Brompton Oratory" is enough to reconcile me to "Brompton Oratory". The tune is very pretty indeed and I really love the second verse for some reason:

The reading is from Luke 24
Where Christ returns to his loved ones
I look at the stone apostles
Think that it's alright for some

(BTW, we saw Brompton Oratory when I was dragging my niece and nephew around London the other week. What the fuck is it with Anglicans and Anglo Catholics, incapable of constructing a pretty bit of religious architecture; the fucking Methodists were putting up better things than they were. Anyways, a bit of a squat of a church but better than the Basilica here in Brussels, which is certainly the building I'd choose to demolish by fucking hand if necessary if they were handing out demolishing licenses. Seriously, it's piss-ugly inside and out; more basilisk than basilica. I have never seen such a hideously ugly place of worship anywhere. It's like a toad that looked at Medusa).

So he's all awesome, but does he write poetry? I keep thinking his lyrics flirt with poetry - cross into it very often. Certainly more often than most people's, and sometimes absolutely undeniably, like "The Curse of Millhaven". Probably that wouldn't surprise me or even present itself in my mind as a question, except he is a pipol person, and The Boatman's Call in particular is so problematic in those terms because it's such common knowledge that it's about a relationship with another pipol person. And my feeling of what art is, that it's a thing that speaks meaningfully to our collective unconsciousness on purpose, is hard to reconcile with songs about a specific pipol person relationship.

I think the only thing I can do is avoid reading about any pipol person there's even a possibility I might respect as an artist - reviews included, and certainly interviews included - and concentrate any coverage I read on people like Mel "give me a blow-job before I burn your house down" Gibson.

Crack chi

Wow. The kim chi, which I thought went so badly, actually went really, really well. How well exactly I have a hard time saying because it's been a good four years since I had kim chi prepared by a Korean, and because I have another couple of days to go before the first symptoms of botulism would be due to appear, but it is damn good and I can't stop eating it. I think at the point where I'd tasted this batch before it just hadn't aged enough; it's still crunchier than I remember kim chi being but no longer burningly, insufferably hot - the right amount of hot now. I think for the next batch I'll make it less hot because the F-word isn't into super-chili anymore but still, for me it's ace.

So ace has it been, in fact, that on Saturday when I realized how much I'd eaten in such a short space of time, I had the kissing cousin of a panic attack upon realizing there was a risk of me being once more without kimchi. So I decided to blow off the hammam and run to the grocery store to get the ingredients for a new batch instead, which is currently stinking up our kitchen with goodness.

For the current batch I used this recipe, and for the batch that's aging now I'm using a recipe from a book Sam recommended, Wild Fermentation. I'm making ginger beer from a recipe in the same book. It's a good read - God, I love gay hippies, I wish there were more of them - and it's totally firing me up to ferment everything. I'm putting the F-word on the case today to make some peach vinegar while I'm at work, and I'm going to order kombucha gunk, and kefir grains, all of which home-raising of live food is starting to suggest to me that I'm insufferably broody (did have a dream last night about being five minutes away from going into labour). Anyways, I'll wait to second the Wild Fermentation recommendation as cookbook until I manage to prepare a few of the dishes all the way to the end, but it's a nice little read in the meantime if you find it.

Also wanted to flag up to you something I found when looking for more kim chi recipes: pay particular attention to the "shit needle" entry. Koreans, man. Holy fuck. The way the blogger breaks it down makes it seem like there's something, somehow, kind of awesome about that. In the abstract. I'm happy enough to not be subject to it here.

None of my business, really.

Not even to the point of effecting my consumer behaviour in a sort of one-woman boycott of Mel Gibson's work based on the desire to disassociate myself with misogyny or racism, since I was already a one-woman boycott of Mel Gibson's work based on its suckage. But I admit, the one about the blow jobs - that's one for the ages. The history books. People centuries into the future will listen to it in school to try to wrap their heads around how our entertainment firmament allowed insane, socially retarded throwback bogans to be given control of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Anyways, South Park called it years ago:

Confusing canicule

Belgians, man, they're fucking helpless. At least when it comes to the weather. A few weeks of freeze and snow this past summer and the world comes to a fucking end, and now another canicule, and not a fucking horrible one at that, and suddenly it's all heat rashes and sunstroke. For fuck's sake. Just fucking equip yourself - like so:

1. For fuck's sake, if you don't want your fucking apartment to be all hot at the end of the day, draw your curtains on an windows that receive direct sunlight

2. And think about the fucking air you're letting in, man, at the most fucking elementary level just think about it: the air is super hot in the middle of the day. Is that the air you want to come into your apartment? Or do you want the cooler nighttime or dawn air? Probably the second, right? Well, look, there's a fucking relationship between when you open your windows and what sort of air you let into your flat.

3. Following on heat at different times of the day: if you're lucky enough to have air conditioning at work, when do you think it would be best to use it? The morning, when it's cooler? Or right after lunch, when it is both hottest and most nap-timey? For fuck's sake. You'd think that one would be fucking built into the matrix but I work in one of the prime office buildings in the city, and it's fucking not.

4. Baby powder on the heat rash. Or corn starch. For fuck's sake.

5. Carry water and drink it. I know you don't want to look like a tourist, especially a tourist with the poor taste to come to Brussels, but suck it up.

6. Wear a fucking hat, you people look like lobsters who fucking escaped from the pot at the last minute.

7. And now you've got fucking water shortages? This is like the wettest place in the fucking developed world. How fucking incompetent do your processes have to be for three weeks of dry and hot to give you fucking water shortages? Well, that's not really advice, more abuse, but seriously, you've got it coming.

Oo-er, pu-erh!

Had always been violently pro-coffee, anti-tea, most of my caffeinated life, to the point of choosing bad coffee over good tea, but at a certain point things changed. I think when I was working in Paris all those years ago, at a Korean house, and one of the mothers brought me a cup of something special, and I realized it was like I was drinking flowers. Still it didn't cause any sort of revolution in my behaviour. I don't think I actually bought tea, unless I was expecting limey visitors, for a few years thereafter.

Maybe in practical terms the real turning point was the F-word moving in and bringing his minor obsession with tisanes with him. Or maybe it was me drinking a bunch of mint tea in magrebhin places. Maybe the last time I visited both my grandparents, when I consented to have a cup as I had got snotty enough, coffee-wise, to refuse instant, and I realized the reason I'd always hated tea was because they'd been the ones to introduce it to me - as the fruit of a thrice-brewed, lovingly preserved PG Tips bag - revolting, obviously, and not representative of the institution.

But still, I have remained vastly more pro-coffee than pro-tea. It was the mornings what done it. Unless the day was stinking hot, I needed to start it with a strong, strong latte, either iced or hot; on the very hottest days I could manage green tea, but only on the very hottest. If not, I would get headachey, cranky, and flirty with excessive violence. Nonetheless, we got to the point of drinking a few pots of either green tea or tisane a week. And then it felt like a reasonable investment to drop 50 euros on a tetsubin. Painfully trendy and heavy as fuck, but I had managed to break two china teapots in as many years so it seemed like the only thing to do.

I have found what could be a turning point now, though. In Shanghai we found a tea shop, where we sat for some time after having a long walk in the heat, and where we must have drank twelve different kinds of tea in samples . . . some were lovely and some were gross but my favourite was a six-year-old pu-erh tea which I bought and took home. It is ace. Not only can I drink it in the morning instead of coffee without getting a headache or punching anybody in the fucking face on the way to work, but it also tastes so rich. The sort of same deep, biting richness as coffee, though without coffee's salutary bitterness. Indeed without any bitterness, which despite my being a coffee-head is charming in itself.

In a bizarre, opposite-side-of-the-world echo of my grandparents, the young man working at the shop told me we could brew each bit of tea ten times before it wasn't good any more, which has turned out to be truer than it was for the PG Tips bag. And aside from these ten times, the tea needs to be washed twice before the first brew since it's all covered in weird bacterial shit and dirt from being fermented.

Anyways, this shit is magic. I paid about 20 euros for a great big brick, which I don't think was a round-eye upmark since the prices were posted, and it was twice that in the aeroport, so I imagine it would be ridiculous after being exported. But really, if you ever pass through China treat yourself to some. Will it replace coffee in my heart? Certainly not, especially as we're moving to a chunk of Australia where coffee is cultivated and I bet that it is going to rock like I've never tasted before. But as we prepare our move to a sub-tropical climate I'm damn happy to have found something caffeinated I can drink on hot mornings that will allow me to preserve the life and well-being of the people around me.

The invisible line between incompetence and fraud

In a reasonably foul mood this morning. Have been subject to a bout of incompetence or petty fraud (always hard to tell the difference in Belgium) from a local ASBL, the Partenariat Marconi, over our organic drop-offs. There is something unutterably repellent about grown-ups lying like naughty children who've been caught in the act, and something infuriating about them then using the fact that they're non-profit as some sort of excuse. Anyways, I've been having a hard time walking it off, probably because it was combined, yesterday, with a few other pieces of egregious Belgiousity, notably from my old bugabear Belgacom, the very first full day I'm back from vacation . . .

Goddamn it, am I ever sick of this place. My consolation up until now has been "at least you're not still in Paris," but ever since I lost my horror of Bluebird, and left the starving student class behind to take my place in the financially comfortable bourgeoisie (the class for which Paris was quite literally made), and started going back on visits and appreciating afresh its startling beauty, and realized that they have fruit and vegetables there that aren't grown in a hot-house and thus actually taste like what they're meant to be, and that constant low-level Parisian hostility is in many ways preferable to constant elevated levels of Walloon childish incompetence, no matter how many smiles the bollocks is couched in here versus there - well, that trick has lost its charm. I have reached the end of my tether. Have I said that before? Well, this time, I mean it more.

Luckily, the Mounties have shocked my pants off by, about a week after writing to tell me they hadn't yet received the criminal background check application I'd sent them in April so it was likely to take another four months, sending me my criminal background check. That means all the requisite papers for the Australian visa are together, and hopefully it will not be long before it clears. Thank god. We already have a pretty defined shelf-life in terms of Brussels - we already knew when we were going to leave. But now it is sorted for us to dash straight into the arms of another summer, not long after this one finishes. European Winter, you can shove yourself up your own ass.

Time and forgetting

Oh argh. Had a lovely fortnight of vacation with a niece and nephew, who had never seen Europe before and needed to while I was still here, and now I'm back - missing them, working, facing the mountains of tasks involved in leaving Brussels, and apparently coming down with a cold despite the two-week heatwave. Oh well. I still feel better for it. And have discovered something I didn't know or understand at all in the past: time works differently for children. I should have known that because I can actually remember time working differently for me back in the day. But it was not something I understood on a practical level until now. Two weeks would have been a ridiculously short time for them to do all the stuff we'd done even if they'd been adults . . . at their age I'm shocked we survived. Luckily they're good kids.

Whilst whizzing around the continents on trains, managed to read two books: Middlemarch and King Leopold's Ghost, both awfully good in their very different ways. Middlemarch was a hell of a tasty treat. I don't think I could have read it when I was any younger though . . . back to conceptions of time. It would have defeated me at the first chapter. George Eliot takes a special kind of patience, or a special kind of conception of time, which is basically the same thing as patience - not one that is encouraged by modern patterns of entertainment. It invites you in, and then she talks to you - George Eliot's narrative voice discusses the state of her characters, which could seem long-winded to the impatient, but to the patient, it's the smartest and most understanding person ever having an awesome conversation with you. And this is the case in Middlemarch like in no other book of hers that I've read, though I still consider Adam Bede as the finest piece of ass in literature.

King Leopold's Ghost was wonderfully well-written and interesting, though shocking how the blurb on the back had so little to do with the contents, somebody should tell the author. I recommend it absolutely, even if you know or care nothing about the Congo; it's a good way to start, and it's a fine piece of journalistic writing. What is staying with me the most about it this morning, though, is how it seems - while discussing a hideous episode and worldwide humanitarian movement that rolled out just over a century ago - like it's already a work of semi-archaeological history. I can't remember when I first heard about Leopold II and the Congo, but I think it was well after I should have - probably when I was at school for my masters in IR. And I can't remember when I realized the Congo was having a brutal, never-ending war - I think a couple of years before that, or maybe even around the same time.

How could someone like me - a reasonably informed person who read the papers and who minored in history in the undergrad, etc., have no fucking idea for so long? How is it possible that in cultural terms, Europeans and North Americans are better informed about the abuses of the Chinese government in Tibet than of past colonial abuses, present post-colonial economic dealings, and the jaw-droppingly brutal wars they feed and finance in Africa, where so much of our population has came from by hook or by crook? Why has Africa made our collective eyes glaze over? I really don't know the answer to these questions.

Men Who Stare at Boston

In a naughty world, I take perfection where I find it, and Boston's "More Than a Feeling" is perfect. Of all the genres of music I dislike yacht rock is probably close to the top, and of all the instrumental conceits I dislike big, jerk-off guitar solos are certainly on top, I honestly can't think of anything that annoys me more. Earlier this week I was trying to listen to Ritual de lo Habitual again and kept getting annoyed with the solos, and considering when it comes to Jane's Addiction you're either listening to the whiniest voice in rock or the guitar solos, that's fatal. But I actually really like the big jerk-off guitar solo in "More Than a Feeling" and I can't think of another that doesn't turn me off, although that probably has more to do with marijuana brain than another not existing.

Anyways. It is a fucking ace song. I can't think of another pre-1980 song that is so meticulous and tidy, up to true true yacht rock standards, while still having some sort of emotional effect and aesthetic beauty, outside of Motown properties. Or that window of time when the Beatles had figured out how to play their instruments and work with good producers but hadn't started taking all those sloppy lovely drugs yet. I've hitherto resisted loving it because of the horrible wankery of the yacht rock era, which I feel it paved the way for. But that's like hating on Van Gogh and Gauguin for all the art school dweebs who think just because those two weren't great technical painters they don't have to learn a damn thing about formal composition.

Also I have a weakness for dedicated autocratic fruitcakes and it looks like Tom Scholz fits the bill.

The song resurfaced on my consciousness due to watching Men Who Stare at Goats, one of about ten films I sat through on the way to Shanghai and back. Probably the best of the bunch. Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes was in there too and that was kind of dumb though Robert Downey Jr is a real testament to how the drugs keep some of us young, and, erm, what else? It's Complicated . . . that was pretty shitty . . . some kung fu movie about Wind and Rain and Old Uncle Pervert, or something . . . well anyways, it just goes to show you how memorable it all wasn't. Oh yeah, there was another George Clooney film, Up in the Air, that was also kind of shitty. Men Who Stare at Goats was at least cute . . but facile, I thought . . . begging for the Coen brothers really, and considering they've been begging for some decent material it's a pity they missed each other. Also, why does Ewen McGregor keep getting wasted by his directors? I'm not just talking about the schlong not being got out. I totally remember him being this super-good actor a decade or so ago and he keeps failing to convince, these days.

Red herrings, red rubber and a fucking Wallonian idiot

In between other things recently I re-read Heart of Darkness. I made myself read it more slowly than usual, really sinking my teeth into each sentence. As the F-word says, it's an epic book, an epic in less than a hundred pages. I'm not confident that I'd given it that sort of treatment sufficiently in the past. Of all the books where not a single word is wasted!

To me now of course it's a book about Belgium: I honestly believe that Conrad had in mind to write a book about how much Belgium sucks. But naturally after I've spent three years here that's how I read it, and I'm sure in another year or two I'll read it in a completely different way. And if I could travel back in time to me when I was 15, and read that book for the first time, and say, "Little Miss La Spliffe, this is a book about how Joseph Conrad thought Belgians blew, and you will understand that after you've spent three years with the fuckers," I think I would have given myself a very funny look indeed.

But the thing was, what Belgians did in the Congo was a hecatomb. As an achievement of debasement, the Congo Free State is right up there with the Holocaust - so many millions dead in such a short period of time. I'd even argue that in a sense it was a much greater acheivement of debasement than the Holocaust: first because it was all managed without gas chambers, railroads or massive race paranoia, and secondly because the world's collective response to its repurcussions has been an almighty shrug of the shoulders about how those Congolese can't manage to stop murdering each other, instead of the sort of enduring efforts at popular reparation that let the Israeli army shoot Americans in international waters with a minimum of popular fuss.

The way Antwerp has gone on being an international diamond trading centre for no good reason and the fact that small arms manufacture is the only productive industry left in Wallonia - those things just slip under the radar. It would be like if Germany managed to just slip under the radar as the world's leading producer of striped pyjamas and blue tattoo ink. It would be like they had lost the second world war, had to apologize, but were allowed - no - encouraged, ordered by the rest of the world to keep the Jews, Gypsies and gay people working at the labour camps for another half-century . . .

But yeah - one mustn't make that comparison, must one? Part of the reason I'm feeling Heart of Darkness is a work of classic literature about how Belgians suck is because Belgians are still sucking. Hard. A la Louis Michel, sadly not just some fucking crank on the street, but an ex-EU commissioner whose work focused on the Congo, and who remains significant in post-colonial affairs. I understand that the Nazis had a genocidal philosophy and that the Belgians didn't, as Michel insisted, but that is the red herring of all time. It's a common Belgian defence when the Congo comes up, and a feature of the African museum's only updated exhibit here - minimizing the slaughter by arguing successfully what no serious historians disputes - that the Congo Free State was not an effort at genocide.

However, the fact the Germans murdered millions of people with a plan and the Belgians did it because they didn't give any sort of fuck about whether black people lived or died whilst they were being brutally exploited doesn't incline me one way or the other in terms of who out-evils who. Really just encourages me once more to think of the Belgian history in the Congo as a truly supreme example of debasement: they committed or facilitated all those murders in a psychopathic, unthinking fashion, when you'd think that sort of damage would need to be carried out by calculating sociopaths.

All of which is a long way to say I hope this goes somewhere. There have been apologies; there was the almighty stink a century ago occasioned by Casement and Conrad and Mark Twain and a bunch of other people who worked out the horror of what was going on, maybe one of the first such stinks. But has there been any accountability? I saw Leopold II's sarcophagus the other week, he sleeps soundly with all the other dead kings in an empty white room, where a sarcophagus lies waiting for the present king, with no splash of colour except a security guard making sure visitors don't take a shit on anything. And the post-period - the entire Belgian Congo - the population here has no more idea on that one then what they get out of Tin-Fucking-Tin (though it's nice to know that eventually Herge felt bad about all the hunting scenes in that book).

I'd been wondering how I'm going to accept living in a country like Australia, where it's much easier to argue that genocide did take place with no repurcussions to the population that did the cleansing, and insufficient compensation to them as have been cleansed. Trust a nice spot of upper-class Wallonian idiotic surreality to persuade me it'll probably be an improvement on here. Thanks Louis Michel, you fucking twat.

Slick

Still not sure how, though I believe it had something to do with completely ignoring the World Cup*, but this weekend magically managed to pull some extra hours out of my ass and make some things - moisturizing lotion and kim chi.

The lotion was the easy part. I seem to be trying to extend my food ethics - the 'don't eat anything you wouldn't kill yourself' - into my cosmetics ethics - 'don't put anything on your skin you couldn't eat if you were starving'. And it's dead easy to make a really lovely light cream with all the special treats you want once you have an emulsifying wax you're happy with. It's also somewhat necessary in our household, as the F-word, despite looking butch as all hell, has slightly fussy skin.

What is problematic - the only problem - is the preservatives issue. I'd rather just do without, make small batches, refrigerate, and use fast, both because of the abstract extension of my food ethics into my cosmetics ethics and because of the F-word's fussy skin. Which is for the best. Do a quick Google of all the 'make-your-own' etc. sites and it gets heated when it comes to preservatives, I think because people try to sell their own products and feel shoe-horned into using them. And I have to admit, the possibility of selling has presented itself to me too, because what I make is so damn lovely and wholesome. But I don't suppose I could do it without adding preservatives, and suddenly it's not so edible anymore . . .

Anyways, so that was fun, I always like making cosmetics, it's an excuse for me to mess around with beakers if nothing else, and since I haven't done that since OAC science about 14 years ago that's a thrill. Also the fussy little kitchen scale, which makes me feel like a low-level drug dealer.

The kim chi was the more difficult part, since it was a first effort and since it's still a work in progress, as it needs to finish fermenting. Also I think I burnt my right hand blending in the chili pepper but if it works it will be utterly, utterly worth it. When I was in Shanghai I had a few lovely cabbage dishes which were either pickled or fermented, and coming back here, to this barren land of overcooked European dishes, I realized I can't just hold out until I get to Australia - I need some fucking kim chi now. Patience, tummy, patience, soon you'll be filled with delicious spicy beneficial bacteria. Mwa ha ha.



*On Sunday morning after our guests scarpered, while the sound of Aussie Rules football filled the apartment while we vegged, I was absurdly proud to be one of the maybe 3 households in Benelux watching a different sport . . .

USA Wins 1-1

After I spend a lot of time hanging out with Americans while in Europe, as this weekend, I feel simultaneously refreshed and slightly nauseous, like I've eaten too much watermelon. It just never ceases to amaze me how they can cut to the heart of some things and have a breadth of vision that baffle the locals here - mostly on the personal level - and are so infantile when it comes to other things, like the way anywhere else in the world works. I especially love to get them going about China. Not saying I understand China or anything but all of their imaginings based on sheer bloody panic over the possibility of getting replaced is really hilarious, and oddly cinematic, as if it hasn't even entered their head that the billion plus population there is made up of real people with aspirations to not get malnutrition and not the soulless Yellow Hordes.

Anyways, all that to say that contrary to so many non-Dutch Europeans (the Dutch seem to love Americans, who owe them a hell of a cultural debt), I really do enjoy their company and I don't find them annoying in the least. And part of that is because I really enjoy the way they make fun of other people. It's the really great thing about arrogance, you know, it's funny, a lot of the time on purpose.

This, for example:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
America's Strained Relationship With England
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

Gourmands of the world, unite!

The long silence has been due to a long spell of hard work and a long spell of China, where all of this sort of thing is not allowed - no Twitter, no Facebook, no Blogger. It was my first trip to Asia and a very low-impact one since 85% of it was spent in a five star hotel, but we did get out to see the more touristic, accessible parts of Shanghai, and I got to eat. A lot. I got to satisfy my wildest, most frustrated cravings - the stomach-grinding misery anyone used to living with a lot of Chinese-extraction-type people will know if they move to Europe, this goddamn culinary desert.

I think Canadians are so deeply unaware of the benefits of our sort of multiculturalism that it worries me because it is something worth fighting tooth and nail to preserve. I could go on for days about the dangers, inaccuracies and moral pitfalls of basing politics on ideas of nationality, and I have, on occasion. And I'm not saying the fractured but blanket snobbery of eurocentrism is any less awful than any other ethnocentrism - that the Han Chinese or American model of basically denying any differences at all exist (beyond the differences promoted by apparently recalcitrant, headstrong cultural perverts like Tibetans or Hispanic people who don't bother learning English) is better.

And I have to acknowledge that in Canada, it is very likely that what we have works as smoothly as it does because our immigration system is extremely aggressive in keeping out illegal migrants, refugees, and any other new residents who aren't already a part of the middle class in their home countries. In fact, if the EU started applying Canadian standards in terms of immigration or refugees, it would have to be after a violent swing to the right - which makes it rather amusing when Canadians seem concerned about European anti-immigrant right-wing movements which are actually a bit left relative to our mainstream.

Of course, there are certain qualifying factors there: in Canada, we're apparently content to hire each other to clean our toilets, strip in our strip clubs, have sex for money, and take care of our children and elderly people, so our present immigration policies are a continuation of older ones - whereas if they came in effect in the EU, it would mean reversing long-standing policies of importing millions of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the old Yalta countries to do all that stuff cheaper. And while Canadians can just check people's passports when they get off planes and then let Fortress America and the weather take care of the rest in terms of border control, the EU would have to bristle up into a little gun-turreted stronghold to keep people out. Europeans, in short, couldn't do what we manage to do so quietly without declaring war on the world.

Anyways, qualifying factors and moral provisos and everything else notwithstanding, the multicultural climate we've ended up with in Canada is really ace. The country is a sort of non-interfering, co-operative union of the international bourgeoisie, and being bourgeois is totally where it's at. There are a lot of reasons for that, which I didn't understand until I became middle class myself, and didn't understand until I met a lot of people of my father's background, in particular, who hadn't gone to the trouble that he'd gone to of getting into the middle class.

The acest thing I can think about it this morning is that the middle class is the foodie class. Sure, the working classes make awesome food - in fact, the awesome food, the food that is the basis of their countries' culinary heritage. Ruling class food is a series of fads and false traditions with no staying power and it should fuck off and die. But the middle class is the class that has the combination of the cultural memory of being working class combined with the leisure to explore and experiment that lets them try lots of new kinds of food.

And in Canada - and I'm hoping to fuck the same applies in Australia and New Zealand, as you might imagine - we, as a nation dominated by the urban bourgeoisie, we can eat at a different kind of restaurant every night of the week for two fucking months if we want to without repeating, at prices accessible to a middle-class wallet. Do you know what would happen if I tried to do that in Belgium, which is supposed to have one of the foodiest cultures in Europe? The fucking process would last two weeks, maybe, and if I wanted anything from outside of Europe that wasn't absolutely fuckingly vily blandified for sissy European palates, I'd go fucking broke. Oh my fuck, it is so annoying.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

I don't care that this is an attempt at viral marketing, it's one of the best things ever:



I really adore streakers. I love the way they get out there and run around and are all happy a whole stadium full of people get to see them do it. I love the juxtaposition between the happy dashing streaker and the very serious security people chasing them. I love that they're just doing it to be exhibitionist idiots, or whyever they're doing it, and that it's something uncontrolled, something very seriously edited out of the television broadcasts, something no-one's making money off.

When sport, games, the way we humans are supposed to relax and enjoy ourselves, has become such a passive experience to the vast majority (viewers) and a commercial experience to a tiny minority, including the ones actually 'playing', streakers are a really elegant and hilarious reminder that we're not all docilely swallowing the soma yet. Yep, I love streakers, me. They're this reminder of the indomitable blitheness, the blither side of the idiocy, of the human spirit.

Arrrrrgh, not feeling blithe myself this morning. Got drunk-dialled at 4 am and feel like arse. My friends are all grown-ups now, I can't believe this bullocks is still even possible. I understand there's a time difference involved but I've been in Europe for three fucking years now, time enough to figure out that when you're drunk on a patio in the late evening in Canada and the urge hits you to call me, you should do anything with your fucking cellphone, shoving it up your ass included, rather than following that urge.