screw ‘all i want is to be happy’. i want to sit in a red MG roadster parked on the promenade des anglais, sipping a bloody mary, wearing oversized sunnies and smoking gitane cigarettes.

alternatively, i want to watch this short film non-stop.

watch?v=kBaOx3H_EzA

ah, what will happen to stereolab? does radio silence for six months mean tim has started a new career in the prodigious field of cranberry-picking and laetitia is on a quest for her ruthless, earthly femininity (not to mention making boring music as monade)?

i shouldn’t hope so. they should get off their collective hipster asses sometime soon and start releasing music, or at least give the world an idea of when their fabled new album is going to see the light of day.

this blogger counts on you and your gallic synth sensibility, oh tim and laetitia, and no, monade will not do as a replacement, sorry.

it’s very nice and well if ms sadier wants to express her own musical sensibilities every now and then, but i hope she’ll understand her place is ultimately at the stereolab microphone, singing about world socialism sleepily and shaking a tambourine with moderate success. i’m a stereolab fan, and a very disgruntled one.

sometimes i wonder if i haven’t read enough novels yet. after all, there are only so many emotions to display, so many recurring themes to refer to. these recurrences and similarities can be charming at times; the fact that jonathan coe, siri hustvedt, douglas coupland or iris murdoch always seem to write the same novel over and over again doesn’t matter at all, since it doesn’t come off as a rehash, but rather an expression of a leitmotiv of some sort.

once in a while, though, even the most jaded reader finds a novel to get obsessed about, not because it’s a good expression of something seen before, but rather because it’s something totally outlandish that doesn’t incite any associations or deja-vus whatsoever. this was the case with nicola barker’s excellent darkmans, and is the case with thomas pynchon’s classic, the crying of lot 49.

seriously, i don’t know why i never read this book before. pynchon’s other novels are hulking, complex monstrosities with their very own charms, but this one is rather small at 200- pages, and slightly less complex, and utterly engrossing, too.

oedipa maas, a twentysomething young republican housewife hailing from the charming northern californian town of kinneret-among-the-pines, one fine day finds herself the executor of her ruthless billionaire ex-lover pierce inverarity’s testament.

her husband, the insane dj wendell ‘mucho’ maas, and her shrink, the ex-nazi doktor hilarius, are too busy doing acid and making faces to each other to help her get started, so she travels down to the resort town of saint narciso on her own, and gets caught up in an intriguing feud between two medieval postal delivery agencies that seem to have survived into twentieth-century california, making casualties at random and delivering their mail through a network of rubbish bins called W.A.S.T.E.

this might sound shaky enough already, but seeing as she finds out who she’s dealing with by way of a child star-cum-lawyer, an obscure jacobean play set in renaissance italy, a sinophile inventor and demonologist and all manner of strange philatelic clues, the story is just plainly nonsensical and hysterically funny.

why is it funny? the idea that someone like oedipa (seriously, oedipa?!) really believes she’s on the tail of some conspiracy, just blithely accepts every single fact thrown at her head, and ends up having sex/playing footsie with every single man on her path is just… endearing.

everyone needs something to believe in, and oedipa believes in the continued existence of a medieval conspiracy. there are worse things to devote your life to… and worse things to read about.

last week i found myself visiting a rather cheerless catholic hospital. there is nothing wrong with catholics, as long as they stay out of my field of view, douse themselves with chloroform and don’t use up too much of our valuable oxygen.

anyway, it wouldn’t be good to find yourself hospitalised there if you were in need of euthanasia, because they wouldn’t ‘kill one of god’s beloved children’ till hell freezes over. they would probably keep you alive for as long as they could, and use you as a guinea pig in the name of charity and moral scientific progress. however, if you happened to look foreign or have an arab name, quite the opposite would happen.

i’ve heard an ex-nurse there saying they let islamic(-looking) people wait unreasonably long at a&e, i.e. refuse help, which isn’t all that christian, and hard to believe, until you actually get inside and see for yourself, that is. there were quite a few presumable moroccans in the ward i visited, not that their precise ethnic origins matter, though. they were, horresco referens, foreign, and seemed to pay for that in cash when in contact with the rather fascist-looking nurses. the treatment i witnessed fell far short of ‘respectful’; if you’re the kind of masochist who likes ugly white women hatefully glancing at you constantly and spitefully murmuring below their breath, though, you’d probably have a pleasant stay.

one would wonder how people in public service dare to pull this off, but of course, surprisingly many among the lower 75% are racists and/or fascists these days, so i guess they should have a lot of support from, well, their fellow marginals. it was all shocking enough, however: a hospital’s primary function should be treating and helping the ill (even if this particular hospital has been ‘wrong’ since 1945), not making those ill feel even less well with verbal abuse and suggestive behaviour.

then again, people seem to need an ‘enemy’ more than anything else. that dark horse used to be zionism, has become islam, and… maybe one day it will be petty lower-middle class fascists. it’s not very likely anyone will point to such hopeless, ridiculous and insignificant people as the cause of all evil in society, though, but thrashing their awful, despicable houses would still be nice.

i’m happier than i could ever say. & sort of proud, that too.

tonight, dear reader, your favourite blogger has finished reading an absolutely awful ethnomusicological book about chinese musique concrete. there is nothing even remotely interesting about chinese musique concrete, so it shall remain a mystery how the kraut lesbo author managed to write 400 pages’ worth of pseudo-intellectual ranting about it.

there also isn’t anything even remotely interesting about me, which is far worse in the grand scheme of things. nothing ever happens, and the nothingness of these recent months makes me think that, perhaps, nothing ever really happened in the past either. was i ever happy? was i ever ’so happy together’ with someone? was my life once, if not exciting, at least moderately appealing?

in the end, though, these questions are not of grand importance either. some say all we have is now, and i’d politely advise them to get out of my sight before hell breaks loose. some say all we have is the past, but the past is just that, and maybe i have already spent too much time with blurring visions of how things, possibly, once used to be, of how i used to live.

so if we don’t take the past into account and evaluate the present for what it is (an endless succession of ‘now’s that never really come to be), we are left with the assumption that all we have is, indeed, the future. and that, dear reader, is a worrying thing.

i somehow do not think there will be much of a future to enjoy for me. the likelihood of things staying the way they are is astronomically high, which is better than, say, having to herd cows in the darfur flatlands for a living, but still incrementally worse than other people’s lives and, consequently, fates.

i do not see what could change the way things are right now; i do not see how i am going to keep myself from going really insane (not the milquetoast insanity of last autumn, that might well just have been a teaser for things yet to come); i do not see what could stop me from becoming a spinster; i do not see how i could ever keep any job that goes beyond cauliflower quality control at a dinky, albanian-run entrepot in darkest norfolk; and, worst of all, i do not see how i can do anything about all these inevitable, stone-cast certainties anymore.

i probably could have turned things around a while ago; it might still have been possible around october or november, but now, dear reader, it is much too late. so, take my hand and off we stride, sha la la. i’m a girl and you’re a boy, sha la la la la. the rest of ’sheila take a bow’ is much too painful to write down here, and i’m not going to find the one i love (and he’ll love me-e-e-e) by going out, if at all.

oh, things have undoubtedly been worse. but when things were worse i usually wasn’t resigned to the course of events. the whole situation might not look bad on the surface, but if i was less well-raised and inhibited, and would show real emotions, you’d carry me off to the museum edvard munch’s the scream was stolen from, greedy for rewards and all, before i could say ‘i think i’m going to stay monumentally depressed for the rest of my life’.

***

wouldn’t it be ironic if i went insane right after writing the first half-decent nouveau roman about a flemish suburban spinster going bonkers? it’s exactly the kind of laughable, pathetic coincidence that would have a chance to happen in real life.

“only love can pull you through
the way you have been feeling
but there is no love
there is just interior design
and furniture.”

so on thursday evening we went to this free kim hiorthoy concert. it was surprisingly good, accompanied by strange visuals (at least the support act was; there was this old girl painting aquarels to the beat of this music, and some weird camera contraption somehow captured the images live and projected them on two really big screens on both sides of the concert hall. tres arty.)

apart from that, i don’t seem to remember much (indian cigarettes, eh), but hiorthoy sure put on really groovy versions of my last day’s eleven indietronica masterpieces. and we danced, dear reader, oh, how we danced!

the light effects were pretty too. then i crashed on charlotte’s couch and somehow woke up there after a horrible dream in which i stole a big yacht with the malicious intent to sail it to the spice islands, and start a new life there under another name, surrounded by indigenous surfer boys of loose morale (and scarcely dressed in miu miu’s summer collection).

however, and predictably, that’s not the way things went. my yacht got caught up in a typhoon, and when the storm had passed i found myself on a rather desolate ryukyu island with only one inhabitant, king kong’s nastier cousin.

even in dreams my escapism is fatally flawed.

sad, bouncy songs. insanity. battleaxes. zsa zsa gabor. when liquor is what’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner. shirley simms singing like she’s just had twenty quaaludes and was dragged to the studio by her hair (at gunpoint). a lot of distortion.
yes, reader love, the magnetic fields have a new album. and it’s good. and it’s the first thing to surface from stephin merritt’s main (and best) project in four years.

disclaimer: i still wish stephin would kidnap susan amway, persuade her growing cranberries isn’t the best she can do and make her sing his beautiful songs again, but all in all and nevertheless, distortion deserved a small celebratory photoshoot.

it’s easy to see why some like their opiates served up in church (naive), others get obsessed with money and a ‘career’ (loathsome), and others still turn to family life (ill-advised). i myself fancy real opiates, but anyway…

our collective insignificance is just so overwhelming. there is nothing to be gained by going down this road, i know, and i should turn back at once, i know that too; but what i don’t know is what i’m still doing here when i’m not even… not even moderately amused or pleased by it all.

once upon a time, in a long-gone land far from the western european seaboard, anyone who wanted to ponder about the meaning of life was cordially invited to perch him-/herself on top of a handsome, tall pillar for the remainder of his/her existence, and start pondering away. in return, the locals would assure a steady stream of cakes and tea (or rather olives and retsina wine, this is the byzantine empire we’re talking about).

now this sounds alluring. why should one still get out of bed each morning, try to dress agreeably, try to be friendly to a rather large collection of asinine, inane strangers over the course of that very day, try not to be too tired after a day at the university and try to spend the evening in a nice enough way? why? i don’t see why, really. is there really anything gained by going down this socially condoned road? anything lasting?

i would rather not spend my energy pointlessly and instead devote my life to… em. building a handsome, old-fashioned, doric column? check! reading the collected works of rosamond lehmann and her literary school of 1920s spinsters on top of the pillar i wrought with my own hands? check! gazing down contemptuously on the very villagers who provide me with frangipane cakes and earl grey tea? check!

the road to insanity is steep and slippery, and i seem to have a bobsled. i can’t even seem to describe this dreaded feeling of insignificance that makes me want to pursue a, hopefully fruitful, career in the noble building trade. ta for now, dear reader. i’m going to pretend it’s 1920. laudanum is still sold over the counter and the twenty-first century was just a hysterical nightmare i once had (tres david mitchell, that).
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