It’s a lugubrious world on Monday mornings
By dion | February 16, 2008
Had a weekend and now it’s over. Fuck. Last night we went to see the new Ken Loach film, It’s A Free World, and found it rather chilling. Good, but chilling. The central character, Angie, was an awful girl; her back against a middle class wall, and therefore feeling a sort of desperation that would let her screw over people whose backs were against a real wall. It would have been nice to get more exposition on the other characters, like her roommate Rose, the graduate working in a call centre; would have been nice if Angie’s dad had been more than a sole point of coherence in a cast of otherwise largely (and realistically) inarticulate characters - but then the film would have been less focused, I suppose, since as it stood Awful Angie was wonderfully explored, and there’d have been no easy way to bring up the historical commie theory subtext if her father hadn’t strung words together like, well, Ken Loach would.
On Friday night we went to a concert called Babel which was quite fucked up and interesting, though I was in a blue funk so I was less appreciative than I might have been. 22 fused pieces by a range of composers, range of styles, range of instruments - gamut of chamber orchestra to mouth organ to MacBook. Only real commonality was the peacableness and Indo-Europeanness of it all - actually found it excessively lugubrious, and I don’t think it was just because of my shitty mood that night. Practically an extended lullaby. That’s fine, I guess. But I was hoping for more international range based on what I’d read on the linked flyer up there - for example ever since going to the Musical Instruments Museum I’ve had a thing for one-note west African horns and I can’t figure out why anything billing itself as musically diverse wouldn’t get those in too, because they’re so awesome. But then it’s hard to imagine them being lugubrious or lullaby-ish.
Anyways, that notwithstanding, I was a little enchanted to see that the show managed to fill such a big concert hall. Because it was at least half new compositions from people I’d never heard of before, and I tend to hear about people; because the instruments were so odd, et cetera. There are similar events in Toronto musically speaking, but they don’t fill such big venues, especially with such a cross-hatch of ages, so many young-ish people. Pop culture hasn’t quite drowned in the lights of cable television here.
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Who will rid me of this turbulent wankery?
By dion | February 16, 2008
I don’t like the Guardian website. Not just because of the commas; because it’s crap, and more opinion than news. Opinions, for that matter, about things that don’t belong in serious newspapers and can be settled in two words, like about Heath Ledger being dead now (he is) and Martin Amis being a dick (he is).
It’s the rise of click-journalism at a tired old franchise, fitting in beautifully with the New-Labourish concept of reward-based administration. No point writing good articles, not if you can just write poorly edited pieces of shit with celebrities’ names in them, not if you can measure the success of your articles by the number of people who open them. This sort of thing illustrates how clueless people are about internet marketing. You try to sell advertisers on your site based on the number of people who visit it, but any company that advertises on the sort of ‘oooo-er I can’t believe it’ story which is relentlessly recycled for each celebrity death, that I open because I can’t fucking believe the Guardian has got so very crap, is not a company I will want to deal with in the future.
Of course, based on who’s advertising on the Guardian site, it doesn’t seem to have been working. A tourism trade fair in Madrid and, uhm, a bunch of in-house products, from today’s brief survey. Here’s a link to their online advertising policies. Containing, of course, a HUGE photo of the lady in charge of online advertising, before giving some insubstantive, badly phrased information about advertising online. ‘Zeitgeist’? Holy fuck. Heath Ledger being dead, Martin Amis being a twat, and the new James Bond title being crap counts as the ’spirit of the age’? Fuck you, buddy. You can’t talk about my age that way. ‘Spirit of the wank’ is more like it.
All that notwithstanding, the sports section is pretty good.
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What a concept
By dion | February 16, 2008
I have got wound up about Benjamin Biolay many, many, many times, and one of those times took a moment to write about how he’s not like Serge Gainsbourg despite everybody saying he is. It shouldn’t have taken a whole moment - should have only taken half a moment to describe the difference, which is that Benjamin Biolay’s music has zero fucking sense of humour/absurdity in comparison. Let’s compare concepts one more time:
L’homme au tête de chou
Concept: Having a relationship with a hairdresser who you murder in a fit of jealous rage in the snow, being institutionalized, your head turning into a cabbage and the murdered hairdresser coming back as a rabbit, who eats it
vs
Trash yé yé
Concept: The breakdown of a shitty relationship; culminates in a murder on the kitchen floor.
Hmm. Let’s try another.
L’histoire de Melody Nelson
Concept: Hitting a young girl with your Rolls, deflowering her, and then mourning her death in a plane crash to the degree you found your own little cargo cult
vs.
Rose Kennedy
Concept: Rose Kennedy
Well. If I was Benjamin Biolay I’d have a hard time getting in touch with my absurd side too. French pop is all laboured irony and farting accordions these days, so he might be concerned that even a touch of humour or absurdity is going to get him lumped in with Bénabar-grade crap. Or he might be concerned about being compared even more inescapably to Serge Gainsbourg. I don’t know. Maybe he just has no sense of humour or absurdity at all. A shocking number of people in France don’t. They can be so literal-minded. I think that’s because it’s too easy to pun in French. You can trip over six or seven puns just walking to the office there so you don’t have to get too absurd to play with your language.
Anyways, I hadn’t given it much thought until I stumbled across this video and realized I could not imagine Benjamin Biolay ever, ever, ever doing something similar to what Serge Gainsbourg is doing here. Ever. Maybe that’s a failure of my imagination but frankly it makes me think less of Benjamin Biolay.
(This video is safe for work but the audio is not, unless you work somewhere weird.)
Of course, when they broke the mold when they made Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and he’s dead now, so there wouldn’t be anyone to do it with even if he wanted to.
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I love you baby, but face it, she’s shit
By dion | February 16, 2008
Madonna is an atrocious beast. That’s on my mind today because in Ghent on Sunday they were piping her ‘music’ into the abandoned pedestrian precinct/shopping area, I think in the same spirit as the British pipe classical music into yobbo-congregation points. You’ve heard about this? It’s done in other countries too. The theory runs that classical music grates on the nerves of juvenile delinquents so it will drive them away from public places like train stations, parking lots, street corners, etc., where they might be ‘anti-social’ - which in England, at least, doesn’t mean shy; it means being English and drunk.
Maybe now is the time to voice some of my disgust with the state of the England - haven’t been to Scotland or Wales in ages so I’ll restrict myself to shooting my mouth off about England. We had a really smashing vacation there with smashing people who I’m very fond of - English people are great, funny, hospitable, helpful, generous, all the rest of it. But I can’t figure out how they can tolerate the shithole they live in and it makes me impatient. There is a really unhelpful paternalism, bordering on soft totalitarianism, in their government’s relationship with them. The endless 1984-ish CCTV cameras are only one symptom of it, or we can say part of a broader and defining trend.
And that is that the government, whichever party is in, consistently relinquishes control of national assets that are obviously best run by a proper ‘paternalistic’ government, competition in those sectors being problematic or impossible (like the rail service, civic public transport, and its own fucking monetary policy), while struggling more and more to control the behaviour of private individuals through the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, Asbos, extended chargeless detentions. . . The Asbos are especially funny in a soft totalitarian sort of way. The most hilarious thing about them is that they were tightened up in 2005 - the same year the UK government allowed 24 hour drinking.
I can’t see how that pattern - a consistent, cross party trend of letting go of the control of public concerns it should be controlling, struggling for control of things that private individuals should be controlling themselves - can come off as anything except a nasty and apparently corrupt soft totalitarianism. And I can’t figure out why the British people have allowed this to roll out over the last 20 years. Belgians put up with remarkable amounts of undemocratic shit from their adminstrations but just try throwing that combination of lousy services and incarceration-happy government at them; they’d bring this place to a standstill in 15 minutes.
Anyways, Madonna. Though she’s an atrocious beast and though her music being piped onto the deserted Ghent pedestrian precinct hurt my ears, I think it was a good choice. Because in every single one of her songs, from the slowest to the danciest, her singing always, ALWAYS sounds like she’s scolding the shit out of you and that the best thing to do to get her to stop would be to get far away from her. Such an awful, scoldy voice. I just don’t get it, you know. You’d have to be a raving, self-loathing masochist to like that crap. ‘Justify my love - now - NOW, you fucking piece of shit! God that’s good’ And so on.
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The Bedside Book of Bitching
By dion | February 16, 2008
Read a very pretty book for review this weekend - The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany. Full of lovely Audubon-y type pictures and texts from a great splayed range of sources, from Ovid to Bruce Goddamn Chatwin. Man, do I love Bruce Chatwin. Judging by the sheer quantity of his books filling up my shelves I suppose I must like Paul Theroux better, but Bruce Chatwin - anyways, that’s a blogasm for another day.
It was put together by a Canadian author called Graeme Gibson, who I’ve never read. As a rule I liked CanLit but I stopped reading it when I left for Europe the first time, back in 2001. I’d got so sick of Douglas Copeland and everything Margaret Atwood wrote that wasn’t short stories (her short stories are very good) that I wasn’t willing to extend myself to find or order new Canadian books. Stupid of me. Like rejecting BritLit just because Martin Amis is a fucking ponce. I’ll dip my toes back in soon but I don’t think it will be with Graeme Gibson’s books. Apparently in 1996 he decided he wouldn’t be writing any more novels and that makes me suspect he wasn’t getting much out of the form.
And I don’t like his sentences in the introductions he wrote for each section of the birdie book. He has this one pair of sentences - the violent dislike I have for it is so far up my ass that obviously this won’t be anywhere near the real review, but I dislike it violently nonetheless, especially as it concludes a section and is therefore unignorable:
“It’s we who have made the cages. It’s we who must open them.”
First of all, I’m nearly certain you need the object pronoun there and the singular form of ‘have’ - that is, ‘It is us who has made the cages’ - because the plural ‘we’ isn’t the subject of the second clause: the singular first clause, ‘it is us’, is the subject of the second clause. I think that’s the underlying, emotional reason for my dislike. I taught English for three and a half years and when Anglophones use sloppy grammar to create a needlessly complex construction it gets my fucking goat. There are millions of people struggling to learn the ridiculous intricacies of our ridiculous language, often for pressing economic reasons. Why fuck it up further in confusing ways? Grammar is a series of signposts and landmarks to the people learning the language so I react a little bit violently when our intelligentsia doesn’t play by its rules.
In any case, why not just write “We made the cages. We must open them.”?
Anyways, none of this nonsense will be in the real review, which will be glowing. It’s really a very good book. Good selections - you run across some old friends and meet a bunch of new ones that you decide you’ll have to meet up with in the future. I haven’t looked at Casanova before but I will now, after his funny story about the loose woman and the parrot. I recommend it.
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Sexy sedition
By dion | February 16, 2008
So we did indeed go to the Marriage of Figaro yesterday and Paolo Szot, as predicted, was sex on legs to a degree that’s not fit even for pseudonymous print. I enjoyed it very much, but the Ghent opera house has horrible sightlines from the nosebleed section - really shitty compared to the Star Wars-y new Toronto opera house or the State Opera in Berlin, the last two places I sat in the nosebleed section. But different times, different priorities. The Ghent house seemed much older, and viciously, blowsily ornate in a way people in Toronto might recognize from the Winter Theatre, or the Elgin, or whatever the fuck corporate name they’ve slapped it with following its umpteenth buyout. I think it was the Kodak Theatre, or the Minolta, or some other C-grade photocopier company.
That was something that bothered me about Toronto - everything was getting slapped with a corporate name. The new opera house is the Four Seasons, I believe; the Skydome is now labelled the Rogers Centre after the evil incompetent media company that once pushed me into screaming at some poor fuck working for minimum wage at one of their call centres, and then all the big performance theatres are corporately renamed too. I know such institutions in Canada really need the money now that they can’t take funding from cigarette companies anymore and our goddamn cheap government doesn’t mind the idea of us satisfying our cultural needs by watching American network television. But that doesn’t make me feel any fucking better. Canadians are struggling along with the same retardedly high tax burdens as most of Europe, and most of Europe doesn’t have to fucking rename its cultural landmarks after the corporations that keep them afloat as an advertising tool. AND most of Europe has a public health service that functions a hell of a lot better. Anyhow. I live here now so I should get over it.
So, the Ghent opera house has horrible sightlines. The F-word got frustrated and left for the second half, which is too bad because the second half is where it gets all horny and one thinks of what a naughty little perv Mozart must have been. Also too bad because, like always, the second half is much emptier, as people realize they’ve over-estimated how much they like opera and can’t face the last 1.5 hours.
The Marriage of Figaro is a very sexy and naughty opera, and the naughtiness has a real political tone, of course; it famously raised some eyebrows by mocking an aristocrat by showing the comparative cleverness of his servants - there’s something deliciously seditious about the whole thing still. But what I like the most about it is the distribution of lead voices - baritone (and it’s Paolo Szot, a hot Brazilian baritone who can act at that), bass baritone, some sopranos - no fucking tenors, who usually don’t do anything good for me. Even Cherubino, the young horndog, is a cross-dressing mezzo. She (in this case, Angelique Noldus) really stood out for me, as did the Countess, Maria Bengtsson - a lovely, rich, velvety voice. Ainhoa Garmendia as Susanna was vocally unobjectionable and a better actress than the other two, though I only got to appreciate that in the second half when part of the audience had fucked off. Figaro, Tuomas Pursio, was frigging awesome. I must add him to my stalk list as he’s worth weekend tripping to another city for.
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Prejudiced
By dion | February 16, 2008
Hilts is excited about Persuasion. I am too. I reckon it vies with Pride and Prejudice as my favourite Jane Austen novel, which is saying something, because I love Pride and Prejudice. I have a problem trusting people who dislike Jane Austen wholesale, to be honest - I just can’t work out why and immediately suspect they haven’t actually read Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion. Charlotte Brontë didn’t like Jane Austen’s writing much; I think her objection ran along the line of her characters being ‘more real than true’. I love Jane Eyre more than almost any other pile of words, so it pains me to reconcile such a dinky comment with such a mammoth author. There was plenty of truth in Austen’s characters, particularly in Persuasion - and not to be snarky about it, but Louisa Musgrove alone has more ‘truth’ in her than all of Charlotte Brontë’s secondary characters put together.
The 1995 version of Persuasion is the only film version of a Jane Austen novel that I like, and it, along with the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice with Jennier Ehle, is the only film version of an Austen novel I’ve seen that hasn’t made me want to spit nails. To be fair, I’ve stopped watching them. Two of them pissed me off irretrievably - the Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and the Pride and Prejudice with the skinny chick from the pirate movies. Those two punked out at the emotional climaxes so pukably. Eleanour is not the sort of woman who’s going to burst out in tears in front of her lover. Making her do that to prove a point about sense and sensibility being best as a delicate balance is as fucking laboured as a Kevin Smith movie. And Darcy and Elizabeth traipsing around in the dewy fields in their pyjamas to wind up Pride and Prejudice! Holy fuck.
The worst thing about that Pride and Prejudice, though, is how it turned the spat after Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth into the equivalent of two teenagers whining at each other, for no reason that I can accept. Austen’s dialogue for that spat is concise and some of her best, and the filmmakers wouldn’t have wasted any time using it instead of using the made-up adolescent shit talk they replaced it with. What’s more, it’s what the rest of the novel hangs on; the idea that Elizabeth can point out to Darcy that his behaviour hasn’t been gentlemanly in such a way that he’s going to spend the rest of the book realizing she’s right, feeling bad, and trying to be more gentlemanly. And so get her to fall in love with him; with the help of his gorgeous estate and fabulous wealth of course, ladies being only human. But take that away - as the film makers did - and all you’ve got left is an unexceptional shitty Hollywood romance that isn’t worth suspending your disbelief for because there aren’t any knobs in it.
Anyways. That wasn’t what I meant to go on about. This is the problem with blogging before work - one goes off an a tangent and realizes one hasn’t mentioned how great the documentaries of Adam Curtis are and how you can find some of them streamed online, and that there isn’t time to go back and change anything - sigh. But I would like to mention that the F-word and I got back together when I was 27, and a spinster in that I had decided that extended romantic relationships were for the naïve, poor, or those without hobbies. It gives me a new feeling for Anne Elliott of Persuasion, which is cool, since previously the fictional chick I’d identified the most with was Rochester’s crazy wife.
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Model me this
By dion | February 16, 2008
When I use my words out loud, I sound like a bigger bitch than I feel myself to be in my head, because I’m not very good at using my words out loud. For example, yesterday I nearly started yelling at a co-worker because she couldn’t understand why she, a bird in her 20’s, was getting her television role models from aged types like the flakes on Sex and the City.
Fuck, I hate Sex and the City. The first season was funny and then it was all whine, whine, whine, tick, tock, tick goes the biological clock, oh, Mr. Big, blah blah blah. Imagine dubbing a man Mr. Big on a television show that ran for WAY too many years and never giving the audience a shot of his marriage tackle. I don’t know how Chris Noth is set up but surely they could have hired a stunt cock if it was called for. Fucking fatuous. Call yourself groundbreaking, jeebus. I’ve seen more ground broken at ancient Indian burial grounds.
Anyhoo, I was polite enough to refrain from pointing out that having a role model your own age was more narcissism than modelling, or that it’s just daftery to look at television for life guidance, and instead pointed out that people in their mid-twenties aren’t attractive to advertisers. The perception is that they’re struggling with some sort of debt, be it retard debt from not understanding credit cards or else student debt or both; they have less disposable income than teenagers, who don’t have fixed expenditures AND who have parents buying for them; and they have less money overall than people in their thirties, who’re generally not struggling by on entry-level wages anymore - and while they may have more fixed expenditures than twenty-somethings, those fixed expenditures are for things you can advertise at them - cars, baby stuff, furniture. Whatever.
So while you might have some crap ripoff where-cool-goes-to-die consultancy like my old bête noire Youthography promising to help advertisers tap into Generation X2, Generation Y, Generation Get-The-Fuck-Out-Of-My-Face-I-Bought-What-You’re-Selling-Already-Even-Though-I-Can’t-Afford-It-Because-of-My-Student-Loan, or whatever the fuck they’re calling us now, the odds of any production companies investing substantially in producing television programming aggressively geared towards people in their twenties is poor. Sensible advertisers will just not be into it.
Anyhoo, I pointed this out to my co-worker, whose response was that she felt she wasn’t being served by television. Like she was the customer. After all that time working in television advertising I know that viewers are not the customer; that advertisers are the customers, viewers are commodities of varying value, and television programmes are merely ways to deliver the commodities to advertiers. Surely I should be capable of of expressing that in reasonable terms. All I felt like like expressing, however, was a bellowed ‘you have a fucking Oxbridge degree! What the fuck do they teach you there?’
I didn’t yell, though. Instead, I changed the subject to how shitty Sex and the City was.
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Give me a simile about womanhood, with a shark
By dion | February 16, 2008
Today I would like to get excited in blog form about how awesome Steven Mithen is, about how he might not have the smoothest prose in the world, but how he can hack his way through a subject with his unwieldly sentences while somehow delicately gather a million far-fetched strands into one elegantly proved proposition, like how the essence of modern humanity is our ability to use metaphors in The Prehistory of the Mind. I have an obsession with metaphors and simile that the book really pandered to.
For example, last night I dreamt that the F-word was sick so I had to go teach his English class. It was awkward because I was stoned, in fact still sucking on the spliff when I walked through the door. But it was alright, because the subject that day was metaphor and simile. I briefly explained the concepts to the class and decided to start the practical work with similes.
‘You,’ I said, pointing at a boy who’d looked like he’d been ready to dive into the trashcan when I threw my roach in there. ‘Give me a simile about sex, using dogs.’ He blushed. Oh well, I thought, at least this is just a dream and I’m not really humiliating myself and teenagers every day in the course of my job. ‘Thrashing around like dogs in a duckpond,’ he said suddenly and hopefully, and the class went from tittering to oooing and ahhing. Then I woke up before I could congratulate him on the alliteration.
I’ve been having odd dreams lately, easy to remember and easy to interpret, which is good; now that I’m too cheap for analysis it’s reassuring to know I can still keep in touch with my beastly but awesome shadow and keep up an integrated self, to a degree. The strangest simile that came to me in a dream was just before Christmas, about how womanhood is like a shark thrashing to death on the grounds of an amusement park. The best simile I heard over Christmas was how some people had faces like bulldogs licking piss of a thistle.
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Pop Star Heather Schmid Attends New York’s Fashion
By dion | February 14, 2008
Fashion Week New York did not disappoint this year with many celebrities attending the Spring 08 line of their favorite designers. International Recording Artist Heather Schmid (www.heatherschmid.com) sat front row at Twinkle, Pamella Roland and Reem Acra, three of her favorite designers at the Tents this year. Heather conducted interviews with the Style Network, ‘Full Frontal Fashion’, E, Univision along with many other national and international TV programs and print media.
Heather’s stylist Naomi Fells chose a creme melding into tangerine dress by Pamella Roland for the designers own show with Dior Jewelery, a black D&G dress with HStern jewelery for the Reem Acra show, and a royal blue dress by Chanel with Tiffany’s jewelery for the Twinkle show. The Grand Hyatt provided the VIP suite as a backdrop for filming the preparations and events of the weekend. Robert Gale fallowed Heather with a camera crew for the short ‘Behind the Scenes of a Celebrity at Fashion Week’.
Heather’s music, and career is formed around the Goddess Within Concept. ‘The Goddess Within’ is about Music, Charity, Giving, Intelligence, Beauty, Power and Intensity.
“Part of my wish is to get closer to my own intensity by experiencing and feeling other people’s passion and devotion. Everyone involved in Fashion Week have such an intensity about it. I attend the shows to recharge and to learn from everyone involved,” Heather stated in an interview outside the Tents at Bryant Park. “The designer’s, the magazine editors, the photographers the public relations people, models, the stylists, hair and makeup artist all have such as passion to their work. ‘The Goddess Within’ is about reaching your inner intensity finding your passion and sharing it with the world. These people are doing it. And loving it.”
Heather will be flying off to Beijing next week for a performance for the ‘Miss Tourism World’ pageant. Heather will be unveiling a new song for this performance and the Chinese Market titled ‘Mo Li Hua’.
www.heatherschmid.com
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