So where do bears shit?

Yesterday I wrote a news brief about luxury and telecommunications products for bathrooms. In-shower tanning, a full-length towel warmer with a built-in flat screen, LCD television/bathroom mirror/touchscreen computer combos, a new line of ‘chromatherapy’ Jacuzzis, toilets with a three-setting bidet and an air-dryer incorporated. Are people fucking lame enough to spend their money on this shit? It’s all shit! Besides the fucking awesome toilet, of course. Bidets are great. But I can still think of thousands of better ways to blow 5 Gs. If we get a situation wherein ‘bathrooms become the new kitchen’ and people race to turn their erstwhile Fortresses of Solitude into a satellite office/wealth showcase, I’ll be disappointed. Not in the marketers, but in the consumers. Mass insecurity makes them race to spend their money on what they’re told is needed to demonstrate their status. And of course that proclivity brings out the marketing ‘wolves’, in the same way someone will always come up to bring a needy hooch home. In that situation, who gets the censure? The hooch or the opportunist who nails her? So yeah, disappointed . . . I always thought I’d wait until menopause or a major health-scare before becoming a recluse somewhere, but I’m starting to wonder.

On fleeing civilization . . . I watched Grizzly Man yesterday. It aired on the Discovery Channel, I suppose after the Oscars told it to fuck itself, completely ruining my plans to get my defence done in one sacrificed Friday night (though I’m very audibly sick, so it wasn’t much of a privation) because I’d also rented the Aristocrats (yeah, it was funneeeeeee) and decided a double-bill of Oscar-snubbed documentaries deserved getting really snaked. Werner Herzog danced a genius line by pointing out the follies of a laughable man without making us laugh at him. The only time I really guffawed was when a friend of Treadwell’s from California described how Treadwell had pretended he was Australian ‘but his accent was more Kennedy-esque’, and, upon Herzog asking if he wasn’t hurt by the lie, answered: “If it doesn’t scare the cows, who cares?”

It was a great movie, I recommend it . . . thing is, I still don’t get where Treadwell's head was at. Okay, he had abused alot of substances, maybe he was dim to begin with, sexually insecure - seems a little too familiar to me, but there’s still a massive disconnect I’m not getting. I love bears - they’re beautiful, cute, anthropomorphic and porcine at once, great attitude. When I lived in the middle of nowhere up north, especially when I was care-taking on the old bishop’s estate, there were often bears around, and I loved them being around. As long as ‘around’ meant quite far away, and the mommies and cubs not being separated by me. Though they weren’t at all scary if I felt they were sufficiently far away, I had absolutely no temptation to get closer. And these were black bears - grizzly bears are bigger and have more of a history of eating people, I think. So where I stop understanding altogether is how he could initially decide to close the safety space which seems so natural and instinctive. No matter how dim you are. Although I’ve heard from people who worked in provincial parks out west Americans can be really fucking dumb about bears, the favourite example being the parents who put honey on their kids’s hands so they can get really cute photos.

If we’ve got to a point where people can’t take a shit without turning off the TV and can’t think a massive indiscriminate omnivore is cute without going up and petting its nose, what have we come to as a species? We’re going to stupid ourselves extinct.

Gotterdammerung was beautiful. Mats Almgren as Hagen and Frances Ginzer as Brunnhilde were especially fabulous; the Norns and Rhinemaidens were both beyond fantastic. The Rhinemaidens especially – their little theme-y funny-keyed bits, when I shut my eyes, were transporting. But there's the problem with this show. It was really boring to look at, besides a glitch that stopped the curtain from opening before Siegfried and Brunnhilde’s love scene in the Prologue. Though the singers took it in stride, that glitch just added to an overall dime store feel. And you can’t have dime store feel with a fucking 5.5-hour opera, certainly not Wagner.

Here’s what I mean – here's Wagner’s stage directions for the final scene of the opera after Brunnhilde sends Wotan’s ravens to Loge to tell him to burn down Valhalla, decides to immolate herself and her horse in Siegfried’s funeral pyre, and tells the Rhinemaidens to regain the Ring by plucking it from her ashes (oh, yeah, spoiler alert):

“With a single bound she urges the horse into the blazing pyre. The flames immediately flare up so that the fire fills the entire space front of the hall and appears to seize on the building itself . . . At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks in a mighty flood, surging over the conflagration . . . the hall of Valhalla comes into view, with the gods and heroes assembled . . . bright flames seem to flare up in the hall of the gods, finally hiding them from sight completely. The curtain falls.”

The COC had the nerve to quote that in their programme so I was expecting some serious fucking sweetness. You know how they did it? Brunnhilde sang a final song to her invisible horse and calmly got into a bed with Siegfried’s corpse, the Rhinemaidens took the ring off her finger and offstage red light was used to show Valhalla burning. WHAT THE FUCK. No, no, no. The whole point of Wagner is that he was about the whole package – the music, the words, and the STAGING. The STAGING.

And you know what counted as a Valkyrie costume in this production? A black Victorian dress with a bustle. NOT COOL. Valkyries are killing machines who ride around battlefields on flying horses. Why would they wear a black Victorian dress with a bustle? And all the warriors were wearing business suits. And the Norns had crappy secretary black skirt suits going on, and the Rhinemaidens had three different costumes, two of which were stupid (Norn-ish secretaries and blue-haired pseudo-raver chicks messing around in very substantial underwear) and one of which was boring. And the power-line set was lame and didn’t make sense most of the time. And . . . and . . . fuck you.

The idea of a minimalist Wagnerian production is as just plain wrong as a quiet riot or an aggressive marketing campaign for Steal This Book. Wagner knew when he put his stuff together that it was more than an opera; it was a complete artistic event. INCLUDING THE FUCKING STAGING. Have I written that already? Anyways, this idea was probably why it was cool to make his operas five point fucking five hours long. And why I feel cheated by last night.

For once I’m not blaming television, I’m blaming tobacco advertising laws#. Gotterdammerung was damn near sold out on a Thursday so I doubt the COC is hurting for ticket revenues, but I understand you need more to mount the sort of production that has highly paid sopranos galloping into funeral pyres. Tobacco advertising gave Canadian arts organizations that more. But noo, gotta protect the poor brainless consumers from a product you don’t even have the balls to criminalize, even if that means subjecting them to fucking minimalist Wagner. The feds really should have thought of a strategy to get the slack that the cut-off in tobacco ad revenue caused in the arts community. Maybe not direct funding, but a better system of tax-breaks or something.

I don’t know.

To accentuate the positive, musically it was thrilling. The thing that shocked me the most is how happy and triumphant it was at the end – echoes of the 1812 Overture. As though the twilight of the Gods was something to be celebrated. Not only natural, but desirable. So I don’t feel like I wasted 5.5 hours, but I think the COC should have spent its budget on something it could afford to mount properly, like Der Rosenkavalier or something. Also, a lot of the people around me spent the last act profoundly asleep.



#I think the site was put together by Du Maurier, so grain of salt, please.

Brain stuck at work

Yesterday I wrote my inaugural article for work about Product Red, a group brand being launched through AMEX, The Gap, Nike's Converse, and Giorgio Armani. The three clothiers are going to market product lines, some made with African materials or labour, whose revenues will go in part to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. AMEX is launching a Red Card (oh, AMEX, you so funny!) in the United Kingdom. One percent of every purchase made with the card will go to that same fund. Now there's some talk of Apple issuing a Product Red iPod. Yesterday I wrote about it in terms of branding and marketing, but I still feel a little rant inside . . .

I'm not sure how seriously the idea is being taken, since the clothiers haven't universally disclosed the exact slice of the revenue from the Product Red lines that will go to the Fund. In my exhaustive hour of research, the idea was getting the most flack in the right wing press (that is, the National Post), which is silly. It's an excellent marketing idea and a neat intersection of corporate irresponsibility and consumer conscience - the invisible hand of capitalism visibly at work, really.

You know, sometimes I wonder, in the eternal struggle between Left and Right, if the winner might be the side that doesn't contrary itself out of existence . . . oppse things because they sound righty or lefty, and not out of a real conviction they're good or bad.

People is dumb.

Anyways, invisible hand, capitalism, yeah. I, for example, only shop at the Gap under extreme duress because I find their shit boring and I've still got a bad taste in my mouth from all the sweatshop reporting. But if I need some t-shirts and I have a choice between something made in a sweatshop from H&M (a store that only came to Canada after people stopped bothering to make a deal about sweatshops in the media, so I don't have negative emotional associations with it) and something made in a sweatshop from the Gap that will offer some small benefit to Africa, I reckon I'd go to the Gap. So there you are. I reckon I'd get the card too. Half the country is already paying stupid interest rates for cards with features they don't really understand how to use (or is that just me again? Fucking Air Miles. What the fuck?). For the companies involved in the brand it's excellent marketing, and for consumers a way to feel nice without having to think about their giving strategy too hard.

The other reason it was silly that the right-wing press was laying into it so is that Bono (yeah, I know, he fucking bugs me too with his girl voice and snowboarder sunglasses - don't you wish Johnny Cash had lived long enough to re-record the whole U2 library? I might actually listen to it then. Not to mention he calls everything 'sexy'. NOT EVERYTHING IS SEXY, BONO, THINK OF A NEW FUCKING ADJECTIVE, FUCK), the 'face' of the brand, basically issued an invitation at the Davos summit for any corporation to jump on the Product Red bandwagon. He even said out loud he expected a few naughty companies to get in on the action and embarrass the fund a bit. This is free marketeering, for heaven's sake - even the face of the Product is open about how corporate participation in the brand is for the sweet press that'd result, not about being nice or going to heaven or something.

Yeah, so, I think it's a great idea. Even though Bono called it sexy. It's not sexy, fuck. Vincent Cassel is sexy. Monica Bellucci (see above) is sexy. Product Red is a fucking brand. Sexy. What the fuck. Anyways, there'll never be such a thing as a corporate conscience because it isn't in people's natures to have a collective conscience. The only way to make corporations nice is to ensure they appeal to individual consumer consciences, and this seems like a cute way of doing it. I hope it catches on, and that it's transparent enough for people to trust.

Yeep.

Shitting myself. I just got a date for the defence - a date I want - and now panicking AGAIN, fuck. On top of that, I can feel a nasty depressive paralysis creeping up on me, and this is not a good time for it. In part because of the defense preparations, in part because of the new job which starts as soon as I finish my latté and walk to work, in part because depressive paralysis leads to impulse shopping and I’m trying to save for Europe, and in part because depressive paralysis bites.

But sometimes people seem so scared by the world – much older people, who I’d prefer to think have things much better figured out than I do. So when I see them scared, it unsettles me. I want to think some day life will be an un-intimidating piece of piss. But the natural follow-up to that is that I’m full of shit, because if life was an un-intimidating piece of piss I might not be so interested in it. Fuck. I hate when I think myself on to hamster wheels. And I’m going to Gotterdammerung, so I’m missing analysis, so Mr. B can’t help me analyze my way off it. Is it possible I’ve become dependent on analysis so fast? That in itself could be depressing. But if one’s in the mood to be dependant, it’s either dependent on that or dependent on something else, I suppose. Anyways, opera usually cheers me up. Don’t know about five and a half hours of German opera, though. On verra.

Maybe this mood is just some early roaring from the Red Dragon. I did have an uncontrollable jones on yesterday for a Cadbury Cream Egg, and did make little orgasmic noises while I ate it which made my office-mates promptly go out and buy their own.

L’hiver me fait chier. When I took my little sick-girl constitutional Monday I wore my spring jacket – not foolhardiness – I would have been miserably overheated in my winter coat. Maybe it was the contrast that made me realize my winter coat makes me look like a Spanish galleon in full mourning sail. Especially when I wear a skirt. I do not have bandy legs – I have fucking awesome legs – but that bloody coat makes them look like two straws stuck into a volcanic boulder. Gawwwd, I’m pissed off today. And listing all the wonderful things in my life, of which there is a seemingly ever-growing list, isn’t helping. I wish I knew what I needed. I have a clear idea of so many things I need and can work for and fight for, but there’s something else I can’t put my finger on, and it’s that fucking inability to put my finger on it that gets me into this stupid box.

Hee hee hee . . . box.

UPDATE

Statcounter tells me I have a reader in Finland who has come back to the page several times by searching the keywords Elisa di Rivombroso in Suomi Google.

Gentle Finn:

The first series ended with Elisa dressing as King Emmanuele's murdered cousin so she could intercede with him on the very scaffold by showing him the list of traitors before the Duke was executed. The naughty man whose name escapes me was busted by both the list and the fact that, as he had had the King's cousin killed, he expressed horror and shock when she was 'ressurrected' in Elisa. The King was happy, the Duke was happy, Elisa was happy, the Duke and Elisa got married, the naughty man got his just deserts, and that redhead aristocrat whose booty you could see in a few episodes fled before all this went down, mortified at her inability to save the man she loved - for he scorned her! Oh, and I think Elisa was pregnant, which is cool, because they were all thinking she couldn't conceive again after getting pushed down the stairs, right? Oh again, and the doctor hooked up with the Duke's sister after her husband died of whatever VD he had, and . . . uhm . . . you know that little guy Elisa was going to marry when she was trying to forget the Duke - it turned out he was nice. That's everybody, right? I think the Duke's bastard son was re-united with the happy couple at the end. Anyways, he wasn't dead.

There is a sequel in the works, my cousin Giuseppe informs me. All I can tell you, because it's all I know, is that the grapevine is saying the Duke gets killed off pretty fast. So I hope you were tuning in for the naked ladies, not the naked Duke. There. I hope you can stop Googling that show now.

I, by the way, was tuning in to help with my conversational Italian. And the naked Duke. Shut up, you.

Recharged

Wow, chilling was everything I thought it would be. Back to work today. Ho-hum. When will I get to chill again? Probably not until my vacation after my defence. Oh well. I figure I can make it until then.

So Freakonomics was good enough to swallow in three hours. The sort of book you can lie in bed and guzzle. When it came out it caused a little furore because it talked up a correlation between the Roe vs. Wade decision from the United States Supreme Court and the dramatic drop in violent crime there in the mid-90's. That was sort of interesting; I found the discussion of crack's impact rather more interesting, and most interesting of all the crooked sumo wrestlers. One got a CSI-y feeling with this book - that it was designed to make economics seem as fascinating as possible to persuade people to go into it, like CSI wildly romanticizes crime scene investigation. But maybe I'm full of shit because I'd already found economics fascinating. If I don't go to Jung school, maybe I'll get an economics degree instead.

Fuck, Spliffe, one degree at a time, please.

Anyways, Jean de Florette wasn't as great as I remembered. That having been said, I'll need to watch Manon des Sources soon to see Emmanuelle Beart wreak her revenge on all those smug French bastards. And March of the Penguins was cute - the birds were, anyways, but thier lifestyle seemed like a vision of hell. One must suffer to be beautiful, I suppose.

Otherwise, the day was spectacular. Just spectacular. Lung-coughing notwithstanding. I braved the 'elements' - whatevs, it was fucking lovely and warm and sunny - and took my revolting lungs for a walk. I love Toronto. Today's entry on DDOI sums up some of our sweet-ass urban decay - thumbing our noses at every pretty-boy city that's been turned into an amusement park for grown-ups. That we aren't. Things grow and fill up and empty out and fall down here. Like a proper jungle. And then we have the Riverdale Farm a three minutes' walk from the roughest downtown projects. And my apartment. Fucking sweet.

I need a job with a three day weekend. My actual weekend was very nice and the people filling it were among the world's best, but it was all running around, you know? Even with the thesis handed in, at any given point I had somewhere else I needed to be as soon as what I was doing was done. It didn't help that I had to spend some time at work. I'd really like to have a Fuck-Everyone-But-Me Day like yesterday at least once a fortnight. In the context of a relationship, such days always seemed like the clearest indicator of love (being able to have such a day with M. Whoever that was even more satisfying than an alone one) as well as the clearest symptom of something fundamental being fucked (NEEDING that alone-day and seperation from M. Whoever because he was a net contributor to your stress and misanthropy). Not to re-hash old shit, but I'm still confused when I remember the unhappiness and bitterness I seemed quite content to be feeling for long periods in the context of some relationships. You know, Lady, like that thing Margaret Cho said - it's morning, the sun is shining on the angelic, sleeping face of your lover, you lift yourself onto your elbow, gaze on him, and scream inside,

"I HATE YOU SO MUCH! I WISH YOU'D NEVER WAKE UP!"

Or something like that. No more of that, please and thank you.

UPDATE

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! SCHOOL JUST CALLED! DEFENCE TENTATIVELY SCHEDULED!

Maybe I can see Stéphane Rousseau and then double back for the Go! Team on the 9th . . . Fuck, I'm nervous now, I have to get my defence ready.

UPDATE BIS

I've hated the Oscars as much as any institution for as long as I can remember. Every year they do something totally fucking retarded that makes me think if the Academy had one head, I'd kick it in. And I just can't seem to get used to it! It's like an older brother who always manages to find a way to make you go apoplectic, no matter who cool you think you are. They manage to find a new way to piss me off every year. This time, it's the near shut-out of Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Dear Oscars:

Fuck you, fuck your shitty costume design award, and fuck Memoirs of a Fucking Geisha and its fucking six nominations. The night you air I'm getting royally snaked, watching three Johnny Depp movies in a row, and then boycotting every product that advertises during your broadcast. And if that covers every feminine hygiene product on the North American market, I'll start ordering them from abroad.

Until next year,

Fuck you.

Languor

I feel like raspy snakeshit. But I’m chilling. You know the last time I chilled? I don't. So I also feel great. Funny how physical problems bring us down less than stress-y or emotional ones. I suppose because 80% of the time our physical problems are reasonably transient shit like broken legs, nasty colds, torn ligaments, headaches, papercuts, menstrual cramps, food poisoning, alchohol poisoning and such, and we can always understand with problems like those that eventually they'll be okay - the knowledge the pain is temporary helps us ignore it while it's there. I wonder if it's possible or healthy to do that with our emotional problems. Maybe the point of a strong emotion is how it consumes all your attention and all your thoughts of the future – your unconscious more or less throwing down and saying ‘Sort me out, bitch! We’re not moving until you do!’

Hmmm. I wonder if I have any objectivity left about mental health after falling for Jung like a tonne of bricks. It’s become hard to believe, for example, that there are people who think about their minds without splitting them up into a conscious, unconscious, shadow, persona, et cetera, et cetera. Yet it looks quite arcane when I write it down. This must be what it’s like to be religious – a complete lack of comprehension about why people don’t believe the same things you do when they seem like big self-evident truth. I should be careful, but I don’t want to be. So there.

And so, I’m chilling. Reading Jung and Freakonomics, watching March of the Penguins and Jean de Florette, sleeping, smoking little hits, and occasionally hacking up a lung. Yes, I see a problem there. I think I’ll go make some brownies. After a little nap. Happy Monday, everyone.

The triumph of the will

Last night I didn’t make it to the Orbit Room to see the A-Team, which means the most culturally significant time of the evening was Mr. N’s Romeo y Julieta. Like smoking a palm tree and a Mojito, bitch. He liked his late birthday presents. My burner is all fuck-y so I couldn’t record the playlists I’d made for him – gave him a loaded cigarette case with the print instead – he seemed happy. I try not to be selfish but I think I’d rather get a mix from Mr. N than make one for him. He does such a good job – surprising choices that work as a whole – when I’m Queen of the World, he can take care of the soundtrack. And it was good to see everyone at J*Fish’s. Nice to get quite fucked up for the first time since the thesis went nuts. Which is only two weeks, but somehow that feels like a lot. I think I’m ovulating, or else really relieved at handing in the thesis. Yeah. I don’t know the difference anymore.

Evidently, I need some vacation time. I also need to prepare the defence. But not today. Today I’ll work for a few hours and then chill. Chill like God wants me to.

It was warm and sunny yesterday – fucking lovely, and now we’re all happier, but a lot of us over-reacted too. I expect every country has a way in which the most of the population denies the fucking blatantly apparent – in England I found it was how one can’t anticipate winter after winter one's pipes will freeze and break, in Italy it was how one can’t stop speeding blind around hairpin turns, in France how one can’t resist having long vacations from elderly relatives during a heat wave and expecting the government to take care of them in the interim. Here, it’s ‘Oh! The moisture isn’t freezing in my sinuses when I inhale through my nose! I'm stripping down, man, because this shit is summer!’

I may have found someone to go to Gotterdammerung with me, but I doubt he'll go for it after he's had time to reflect on the 5.5 hours. However, I think he's got a line on some mushrooms. Shrooms and opera go together like reefer and cartoons, or crystal and jungle, or brownies and loving. I remember the first opera I saw after munching. Barber of Seville, Opera Lyra, Ottawa 1998. When Figaro launched into 'Largo al factotum' I started crying, it was so beautiful. Couldn't stop until the end. Opera gets the shitty end of the lollipop these days - as usual I blame television. Particularly Hanna-Barbera cartoons - 'Largo al factotum' being the 'Fiiiiiiiii-ga-ro, fiiiii-ga-ro, figaro figaro figaro' shit Bugs Bunny was always fucking around. Well, mushrooms fixed the damage that wascally wabbit wrought.

It's Tom Selleck's birthday. This will probably be a national holiday for our children's generation, so I suggest we all take tomorrow off to celebrate. Or, you know, because we're sick after over-exposing ourselves whilst drunk and spring-fevered.