the trouble with saving the world

is the people who are trying to save it.

when popstars poledance: an investigative documentary by agent j

It's got high heels, guns, and vinyl-clad strippers*. It's even got a gratuitous hot Chinese guy pursued by a fembot superagent (though I suspect he may be a Korean in disguise). You can pause and rewind and pause and rewind and pause the part where Jolin does the splits in your face. The only thing that would make this video any better would be if she caught the dude, tore his pants off and they made hot sexay love on the balcony and she tortures him a bit. Whaddaya mean you made better music on your Casio keyboard in 3rd grade? There's music?

I hope this is a James Bond tie-in, otherwise watch out for lawsuits. For bonus points, try not to think about the fact that this is exactly what Victoria Beckham would have done if she were, like, better.

*The faux-bondage outfits are lame. I don't care.

towards a less internet-mediated reality (my break-up with the 'book)

Achtung: this isn't about the sexay, but it does contain non-Aunt-Sue-approved material. Be warned.

Today I purged facebook. I deleted favorite films, quotations, personal information. If I couldn't put a face to a name or it was someone I queued with for cafeteria lunch or blind-dated two years ago, I took them off my friends' list. I poured bleach all over my profile to remove the prelapsarian graffiti of a more innocent networking time.

Like many bad relationships, my affair with the 'book started out fun and flirty. Gradually, though, the problems got harder to ignore. First my professor joined. Worse, he friended me. I accepted the invitation without thinking. I had forgotten Mr Spoon's humorous odes to my backside plastered all over my facebook wall.

The professor's intrusion into this not-so-well-guarded personal life could be damage-controlled with a few tweaks of the privacy settings. But then all these old high school friends starting showing up, and by "friends" I mean people who slammed me into locker doors so often it left a combination dial code permanently imprinted on my pelvis.

In eleventh grade they had the easy sophistication that comes from a six- or seven-figure parental income and access to class A drugs. Now the same girls and boys were putting up pictures of waterskiing holidays with their hedge fund colleagues while I was saving up money to buy cappuccinos. One of the few dropouts, a sweetie who'd been serving pizza in Amsterdam a year after graduation, had posted photographs of his wedding. I'd always felt guilty about fucking his Swedish girlfriend in Cannes during the 1998 film festival; but in the great race of life, he had clearly overtaken me at the quarter-mark. My inadequacy complex clawed its way out of the grave like a long-haired assassin in a Tarantino splatfest.

I could overlook the warning signs for the sake of everything we'd built together, the 'book and I. But then came the nail that broke the camel's coffin, the straw that made the vase drop: Mark.

He looked much the same as I remembered him; a little jowlier, perhaps. He still had that apologetic yet oddly sinister look in his eyes -- the look of a man who, if you ribbed him enough, might buy an automatic assault weapon to use indoors. His profile revealed the existence of a blonde wife and two blonde toddlers who probably wouldn't approve of the Metallica licks he played obsessively every night after finishing math homework. He didn't say why he'd made contact. He didn't have to: I couldn't forget the boy who broke my hymen no matter how hard I tried.

All the intervening adventures haven't erased the memory of Mark climbing through my bedroom window and positioning himself, with the wrong kind of stiffness, for the usual teenage fumblings. I didn't need his face popping up on my 'book. It's a denial of my right to history: to my history, which means change. It means bad relationships end.

So after a long inner debate, I'm leaving facebook. It will be a slow break-up, because our CD collections are all mixed up, and we still have to decide who gets the dog at weekends. I'll miss the jokes we shared, that familiar presence on my browser; but for the last few months we both knew we were just going through the motions.

And maybe someday, if I'm lucky, the 'book, despite its deplorable privacy policy and connections to the CIA, will finally discard the last mementoes of our time together; the shadow of a song, Spoon's haiku to my ass.

Relationships in a teacup [Don Mace]

So, a while back now in the confessional blogosphere there was a mini-trend for paragraph-length relationship summaries:

Megan:

He wanted everything about it so bad I couldn’t refuse. The time he told me that he sat in his dark room waiting for me to get off work shocked me still, almost paralyzed, for minutes. In the end, it would be hard to say who ripped the other up worse or for longer.

He wrote to me first and wrote to me more and kissed me. Then he was gone and I was grabbing at air.

Of course Charmaine could encapsulate the pants off these people with one hand tied behind her ankle. But she's not here, so I thought I'd have a go...


Our first date, we carved pumpkins in Madison Square Park. Mine looked like I'd punched it, but it was the thought that counted. She taught me what good head was, then did the fade.

We were high-school sweethearts. She started college first and dumped me without telling me. Ten years later, after a blissful reunion, I went to New York and dumped her back. I told her.

She was my secretary. She was a paralegal. She was tech support. I was getting a reputation.

She was Christian, but I knew what to do. I shouldn't have laughed when she couldn't pronounce "clitoris".

I found out years later she hadn't dumped me.

She was a delicate, gorgeous Haitian named Sheila. Being Haitian, she didn't appreciate the irony.

She rejected me; I hankered for three years until we kissed.

I read her the Hitchhikers' Guide scripts, with voices. She gave me a plush dog my son plays with. I called her in Karachi but she didn't answer.

She rejected me, changed her mind, then dumped me. We're married.

and I hear they can't jump, either

"The primary splits in American progressive movements are generally between white men who can't dance and everyone else."

 

- S&W poll for Urban Progressive Magazine

In Praise of the Whip [Don Mace]

No, I'm not coming out. It's a book! A new non-fiction, serious bookshoppy one. From the metapsychology review:

Largier displays the form and function of the whip through long textual citations and detailed commentary, but then links these stagings with the corresponding spiritual, pornographic, medical discourses that lend them their specific cultural resonance.

Something for everyone, then. Especially if you're Catholic:

Arousal is perhaps the most prominent and most ambiguous component of self-flagellation, and it is this ambiguity that allows the whip to be conscripted by both the hermetic desert Christian and the modern libertine, presumably for antithetical purposes. Largier challenges and complicates this presumption by exploring the intersection of the religious and the erotic...

So f'rinstance,

[After Bolleau, at the turn of the C18th] The desire behind self-flagellation comes to be seen as libidinous and the eroticism of the whip driven by sadomasochistic images and affects. This explains the rise of an anti-clerical polemical literature which appears in the fifteenth century and continues into the twentieth.

I did wonder. In the end,

The libertine has exposed the voluptuous side of the ascetic's whip and cultivates this for its own sake, while the priest has now become the potentially perverse voyeur--at least, that's how he is imagined.

And there you have it. Don't say I never do anything for you kids.

Update: It's really not obvious that the title of this post is a link to the Amazon page, is it? Well it is. And here it is again:
Amazon.co.uk

if you try to convert me one more f%$#?!ing time

You know I have morals and becoming a Christian wouldn't make a difference on that front, right? You're not dumb enough to think I need God to tell me not to kill and steal and all that shit. You don't think I'm some sort of psychopath? Okay, good. In that case you must be trying to convert me because you think my heathen soul is damned to hell unless I accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.

See, you're doing this for my own good. I get that. So I'm going to try to remain cordial and not tell you to BACK THE FUCK OFF if you try to convert me one more f%$#?!ing time.

I'll try not to laugh at your sheer prideful ignorance in thinking your religion is the One True Way. I'll try not to pinch myself when you attempt to reconcile your alleged love of humanity with your evident contempt for Muslims and homosexuals. I'll try not to slap you in your self-satisfied face when you write off centuries of massacres, persecutions and socio-political disasters committed in the name of your church. Really, I'll do my best.

I'll try not to doubt your intelligence and powers of logic when you put forth the specious argument that it's true because the Bible said so, as if your holy book hadn't been written and compiled by humans, who are known for lying, fabricating and plain old getting things wrong. What's that you say? They were transcribing the word of God? Bahai'i, Mormons and Scientologists say so too. What makes you so damn special? I'd have more respect if you told me Jesus manifested himself before your eyes as you were eating a hot dog and told you to go easy on the mustard.

I'll try not to be insulted when you rudely attack my world view, even though I'm man enough to leave yours alone, because, for fuck's sake, we're at the dinner table. Let's just have a friendly conversation. Leave abortions and Iraq until coffee, at least.

But if you even think of telling me you're going to "pray for my soul", I swear I'll sit on your face until you choke on your holier-than-thou-flavored bake sale jam slice.

Come to think of it, let's do that. It'll be fun.

silent night (r.i.p. oscar peterson)

On his 1964 Trio album We Get Requests, there is a moment -- maybe more than one -- where pianist Oscar Peterson slips into pastiche. He effortlessly resolves a pop song played as a jazz tune with a riff taken from classical music.

It's easy to hear why in a CBC interview, Peterson once described jazz as an "intellectual form". He was nothing if not an intelligent musician; but while the phrase accurately reflects his virtuoso style, it fails to do justice to his playful grace. On We Get Requests he takes tired old mules like People and Girl From Ipanema, beaten to death in a thousand divebar jazz pits, and summons their spirit from the grave to dance with unbearable lightness.

Note the significance of the album's second title word: not we play requests; we get them. And, the subtext reads, you're lucky if we take them. It's a good thing neither Peterson nor his partners Brown and Thigpen played horn; they would have had a hard time blowing with their tongues lodged so firmly in their cheeks.

Miles Davis's famous diss -- that Peterson "makes me sick because he copies everybody" -- missed the point. Peterson indeed recycled as prominently as Al Gore on a book tour: few jazz musician don't. I once played in a band where the trumpeter's favorite joke was to find a way to add the Simpsons' theme tune to every solo without the audience noticing. Peterson quoted and studied others with a flair that left no doubt the talent was entirely his own.

Ten days ago he passed away from kidney failure; an old man's death, quiet and dignified, as deaths go. His prolific career saw him accompany the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, even Billie Holliday herself. Few of his former collaborators survive to mourn him.

If you ask me, the best we can do to honour his memory is put on one of his records -- the aforementioned We Get Requests, My Favorite Instrument, or Night Train perhaps -- and laugh: remembering, in true Oscar spirit, not to take ourselves too seriously, but to finesse our way through life with redemptive good humor; and a Petersonian sprinkling of pastiche.

Quote of the Day [Don Mace]

"I'm monogamous occasionally but I prefer polygamy and polyandry. Love lasts a long time but burning desire, two to three weeks."
--Nicolas Sarkozy's girlfriend.

So, Char, which world leader will you date this year?

(Polygamy?)