>> Just so you know, the sun has come out. Metaphorically and physically. I'm feeling much better, most of my stresses have evaporated (my two most difficult papers were plowed through last night and this morning with a minimal amount of fuss, and I was given an A in one of my classes), and there's now a lot to look forward to -- X-Men 2 tomorrow (sadly, maybe the single most exciting event in my life), Jerry Springer: The Opera tonight, and in the not-too-distant future, my family, my home, my friends, my city, and my man.

Regrets? I've got a ton. But they've slipped off my shoulders for the moment, and while that does lessen the drive to reform and avoid future mistakes, it also just makes me feel so much better in the short term. And I welcome that feeling with open arms.

Oh yes, and: happy 21st birthday, Jeremy Glassman. You are sitting right behind me. And in your honor:

>> It's a disgusting, disspiriting rainy day in London, and I only have eleven of those left before I leave. This fact is a little bit much for me to handle right now, honestly. Cameron's been writing brilliantly about his repatriation to America after studying abroad here, and I doubt I'll be able to produce work of an equally excellent nature on the subject, for a variety of reasons. To put it simply, these four months have been the most fucked-up and difficult of my life, and I don't think anybody, myself included, will ever really understand why. So it's a bit pointless to even hint at the situation; I'm just going to be frustrated by my inability to express what I mean anyway...

So, yes. I'm flying home to the U.S. on May 9th, in time to get to Miami for my brother's medical-school graduation. In the process I'll miss the chance to see Lamb at Shepherd's Bush Empire, which I'm a bit miffed about (Stuart's mockery notwithstanding). But y'know, this entire trip abroad has been all about missed chances, so what's one more, eh? It's just a concert... and at least I'll be back in the fucking sunshine with my family again, sooner than expected.

I'm not out of the academic woods yet. I have two final papers due on Wednesday; one is 3,000 words on arts funding and how it illustrates patterns of world-city competition and governance in Paris and London. That's due by 1:00 PM and there's no way in Hell I have enough research material to write that long an essay on that topic. I also don't have the clarity of mind to go out and do the rest of the research I theoretically require, so I guess I might just be a bit screwed. The other paper is 2,500 words on the Arthurian Legend. I don't even have a topic for that bad boy yet, and it also is due at 1:00 PM on Wednesday, the same day that I'll probably wind up giving a presentation in that class. It's ungraded, and it's about Monty Python And The Holy Grail of all things, but it does require some preparation Tuesday night -- time I should be spending on the paper(s). Fuck fuck.

But once those papers are in, it's pretty much smooth sailing. I will have one more written assignment, due May 8th and also 3,000 words long, but it's for Modern Drama In Performance and I sense that writing it won't be too much of a challenge. Most of my classes will have stopped meeting, and I'm going to see Jerry Springer: The Opera Wednesday night, which is definitely something to get excited about. I'll also have several free days in which I know I should go to Dublin, but I haven't scheduled anything yet.

Instead of working on my papers today, I redesigned the comments for this blog. Worthwhile, right? Riiiiiight. I got the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album too, but I can't listen to it until I get back to my flat because the laptop's disc drive is broken. As is my spirit. The will to blog has suddenly fled my body like an escaping housepet. Blah.

>> Well, that was an interesting few days. Bullet points in bullet time:

• Prol has posted pictures of her birthday weekend in London, and they're all quite lovely. There are several of me, in which I alternately look like a small and wonder-struck child, and like the rockstar that I know myself to be. But who am I really?!? Sigh.
  
  
• On Friday I took an NYU field trip to Charleston House, the country home of the Bloomsbury Group, and to Brighton. Charleston House was quite pretty, and resonated with me in a lot of ways that I simply wasn't expecting. I'm not sure what I think of the Bloomsbury aesthetic on the whole, but there's no denying that they lived some interesting lives... Brighton, on the other hand, was kind of lame. Granted, it was pouring rain which puts one in a foul mood. And I did have fun chucking rocks from the beach (and it's all rocks) into the Channel. And the Royal Pavillion is so ridiculously fucking opulent it is not sane. However, the Brighton end of the trip definitely didn't impress in a positive way. Maybe it's because I was all sad and lonely and had no friends with me on the trip, because I have no friends. Sigh. (Didn't I end the last point with that, too?)
  
  
• Saturday afternoon I puttered off into the wilderness of not-London yet again (!) to visit Simon in his natural habitat. A lot of delicious-looking food was made, but we didn't get to eat any of it because it was for a party I wasn't invited to. Sigh. (STOP THAT, YOU!) I also discovered the joys of crazy-flavored English crisps (Roast chicken and garlic flavor POTATO CHIPS?!? Craziness!) A good time was certainly had.
  
  
• Jeremy and I have tickets to see Sexual Perversity In Chicago by David Mamet, starring Matthew Perry, Minnie Driver, and Hank Azaria. It may or may not suck. We also (I am guessing he's booked them by now) have tickets to see X-Men 2 as early as possible on Thursday afternoon. There is no way on Earth that it will suck. (That said, keep your eyes open for a tear-sodden Mediablog post this weekend).

And that's all I've got for the moment. Sorry.

>> So I'm thinking, how about I just start a blog about the NME? It seems to be the only thing I care about these days anyway, you're guaranteed one post a week, and it's bound to be at least vaguely entertaining. The Modern Age and No Rock & Roll Fun have skirted the shores of such an enterprise more than a few times. Maybe it's just because the rest of the planet's music magazines are so fucking boring and run so scared of actually writing about fucking music that nothing else is worth talking about? (We're talking print music writing, of course -- FreakyTrigger remains the world's best music-writing but they're on the interwebthingy.)

This week the NME has an article about Coldplay. It is overwhelmingly adulatory, because that is the NME's lot in life, to pitch everything high enough to make you think it's worth caring about. As music fans become more and more cynical, the pitch goes ever higher and the absurdity of their convictions becomes more and more apparent -- they will be slagging off Coldplay with unimaginable savagery less than a year from now, you can be sure of that -- but the simple fact of their passion is enough to at least make their often-hypocritical rambles worth reading.

And sometimes they're right about things. It should be pretty obvious why Coldplay are popular -- they write good songs, they're fundamentally decent human beings, and they're systematically rejecting the shittier aspects of The Rock & Roll Game. NME, who are probably the single most virulent non-fanzine publication in the world when it comes to the glories of The Rock & Roll Game (you know the drill -- sex, law-breaking, vast amounts of drugs, anti-fashion fashion objects, et cetera -- there are no more than six pull-quotes in this issue in which some unknown wannabe rock star testifies to his supposedly appealing extremity of behavior), will still allow themselves to run a Coldplay piece which unashamedly allows the reporter to say "This is why I like them" in a non-ironic way, and also to repudiate "jerks who parade their ignorance" and "that old, inherited drug-star crap." It's frustrating to see the magazine double back on itself, but at least it's frustrating in a provocative way, and not a "Why is this magazine SO FUCKING SHIT?" way (as every Rolling Stone experience inevitably winds up being).

My point's a lot thinner than it seemed at first, I guess, but basically it's nice to see a music magazine speaking my language: I like the songs and I like the people making them, and I don't really like the bullshit that's expected to surround all that unless it's being done in a new and exciting way. Drugs are not more exciting now than they were in the 60s just because a new generation in vaguely different clothes and haircuts are doing them, they're infinitely less interesting. Same with cultivated griminess, outlaw chic, smug superiority, unknown and obscure influences, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

I'm not gonna pretend I don't love bands who engage in one or more of those tropes -- the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "WOOOO BEER AND POT AND BEEEEER" aesthetic is infuriating, but the records are worth listening to so I'm willing to forgive. Sometimes it just feels like certain bands get column inches in the NME because they sent the mag a letter saying "We do cocaine! And heroin! While wearing leather jackets! And I've never seen a washing machine, and I grew up on... uh... a pig farm! Yeah, that's right, a pig farm! Love us!" So some journalist or another listens to the free CD that came with the letter, compares the band to someone infinitely better who uses the same fuzz effect on their vocals or whatever (generally by way of an "If ______ bent ______ over the kitchen table and fucked _______ silly while ________ videotaped it" metaphor), and presto, there's a page of the magazine filled up.

*sigh* Off-topic again, I thought I was supposed to be praising the magazine in this entry. I won't even start in on what I find loathsome about the US music mags. In fact I'm just going to stop before I hurt myself. This is a much better thought-out piece waiting to happen, in fact this is a large issue -- What Do I Want From Writing About Music? -- that I suppose I should clarify & codify for myself. So let's hold this thought until I've done that, shall we?

But on the subject of music writing, you owe it to yourself to read Cameron's post about the Paul McCartney concert. I don't have much of any substance to add to it, honestly, so I'm thinking I'm not even gonna try. Go forth and do.

>> Friday night I met Caroline for the first time, at a seafood/vegetarian Kerala restaurant in Fitzrovia called Rasa Samudra. Those who know me and my eating habits are probably already laughing their asses off -- "Seafood? VEGETARIAN?!? CHRIS?!?" but in point of fact the meal was absolutely delicious, especially the kingfish thing that I think Stuart (excellent choice of venue, sir) and I ended up hogging. We all got a set-menu thing, so the restaurant more or less improvised and just brought us out a load of ridiculously delicious things, and the kingfish was set down at our end of the table. I'm not sure it ever really escaped. The service was a wee bit annoying (more drinks, anyone? Drinks? Anyone want drinks? Can I bring you any more drinks? etc.) but otherwise strong, and the food was, again, fucking delicious. The company was great as well; Stuart, Caroline (who's every bit as lovely and charming as you'd think; happy 40th again!!!), Ben of U2log fame (who I'd previously met earlier in the year), Guido (Caroline's friend and travelling companion from Amsterdam), and Sue & Shannon, Bostonian friends of Caroline's who share (well, Sue does at least) the love of Gavin Friday.

After dinner we adjourned to Covent Garden to pub a bit, and were met by Meg & Paul. Alcohol was consumed. And after that it was off to Bar Italia (where else? All the pubs were closed) for the best fucking hot chocolate of my life aaaah. The cliche is that "it was just a melted chocolate bar" but NO, REALLY, THAT'S WHAT IT WAS. Go to Bar Italia (it's on Frith Street, Pulp wrote a song about it, it's open 24 hours, etc.) and order the Italian hot chocolate. Skip the "drinking chocolate," it sucks, I had it last time. You will be rocked, oh yes.

Saturday night was the Massive Attack show (I need to re-edit that post, I did a bit of a shit job with it). And I suppose that's that. Caroline leaves tomorrow, and I thought I'd get another chance to see her but out of nowhere I seem to have inherited a free ticket to see Paul McCartney at Earl's Court tonight, and though I don't have an immense love for the man, I might as well see the other surviving Beatle that I haven't crossed off my Rock School list. I saw Ringo Starr in the summer of 2001, oddly enough. That was, uh, not necessary. So instead of researching my ass off for my World Cities presentation tomorrow, I'm gonna watch some middle-aged folks jiggle to the oldies. Interesting.

By the way, the ticket comes to me via (and I am going to the show with) Cameron, whose blog has just been shockingly fucking excellent since he restarted it and I urge you to go visit, K? Cool. (Also -- new music in the MP3s section, which I hope you'll enjoy. In point of fact it's all old music, but maybe it's new to you.)

>> Nothing much to say, but nobody wants to read about that dumb fucking paper anymore, so. I'm meeting Prol tonight and it's all terribly exciting. Here's to hoping I don't come across like the ass I actually am.

Yesterday I finally realized, after about six years of enjoying their records, just how amazing Massive Attack's music is. Good thing, too, since I am going to see them tomorrow night after all. (Bad news, though -- Sinead cancelled on them. Sigh sigh sigh. Should've known. Dot Allison's taking her place.)

And by the by, if you're one of the fucking shocking number of people who're arriving here via searches for the phrase (which I type backwards to prevent further hits) "seruticp fo daed seibab," then PLEASE FUCK THE HELL OFF. Thank you.

>> I'm on that curious feeling of elation I only get when an academic venture is going well. I'm six and a half pages into a ten page paper, so stopping for an internet cafe break in the middle may seem ridiculous, but I actually think I'm through the hard part. (Plus, circumstances in my flat made this a good time to duck out and take a thinking break.)

Last semester, I had a paper to write on Don DeLillo's Mao II, a book I enjoyed reading but simply couldn't wrap my brain around in any conclusive manner. I chose it for the topic of my final paper anyway, and was not only burdened with the responsibility of having coherent thoughts about the novel, I had to engage five (five!) critical writings on the book as well. Halfway through the paper I reached the moment of truth of all good essay-writing -- So what's my point, exactly? On that occasion, I choked. I bombed out. I dove into the critical articles, trying to find any idea I could hold on to tight enough to carry me through the last few pages. I didn't find it. I got a D-minus -- D-minus!!! -- on the paper and dragged an A grade down to a B-minus in a class I'd really loved. That fucking hurt.

Tonight, I reached that moment of truth in the process of writing, and suddenly, before I'd realized I'd started typing again, I had my point. Bam, it was out on paper, and it looked like it worked. The rush of excitement this generated carried me through the conclusion of the thought and an evaluation / annotation of what's still lacking in the paper; at this point it's just a question of filling in the blanks. I may not quite make my ten-page length requirement but it will, I think, be a logical paper with a vaguely insightful point to make, and that alone is a rarity with most English-lit papers (I'm not slamming my fellow students, I'm guilty too), so I should hopefully come out of it OK.

I know this is not a terribly exciting story to most of you reading, but believe me when I say it's having a somewhat seismic impact on me right now, seeing as I am in the middle of one of those questioning "do I have what it takes?" moods. The last couple of days have been sending me hints that yeah, maybe I do, so even small capitalizations on that kind of initiative and confidence are steps in the right direction. But the enemy is complacence -- if I can get myself up on a plane of productivity, I need to see how much I can get out of it before the next time I fall off. I will fall off, mind you, but it's all about how far you get before it's time to start over. Must keep trying to beat the high score. And since my preceding intellectual & artistic career has set the bar pretty low, it's a pretty heady experience.

(Oh, for the record, the paper's titled I'm Not Here, This Isn't Happening: Uses Of Contrivance, Implausibility, & Delusional Narratives In Lucky Jim, The Butcher Boy, and Atonement. Yeah, I tend to include musical references in the titles of my papers, because yeah, I tend to be a huge fucking dork. What can I say, as organizing conceits they actually do help me out...)

>> So it appears my scheduling for next semester went off without a hitch. Maybe. I say maybe because, despite my having no problems enrolling in it, one of my classes apparently has a prerequisite that I'll be taking as a corequisite, i.e. at the same time as the other class in question. Hopefully nobody will notice, but I need to keep a watchful eye on my schedule to see if they've dropped me from it over the next couple of days...

Anyway. My four classes are: American Literature I, Advanced Fiction Workshop, Colloquium: Joyce (I'd basically decided, even as I posted that last message, that I would be taking it), and Topics In Genre Studies: Folklore (this is the class with the series of prerequisites I haven't quite fulfilled -- American Lit is the last prerequisite). It's a demanding line-up, and their chronological arrangement may be problematic too -- none of my class days (Monday-Thursday) are too heavy, but they all start at 9:30 AM, which I have problems with, and they all have gaping holes in the mid-morning or afternoon that will make self-motivation to attend every session difficult. I think I say this every semester, but this time, I'm just not going to let it happen. You hear me? I'm just not going to let it happen. I may not have perfect attendance, but I won't let my worst of my truancy problem rear its head again.

Now, on to one of these papers... but first, lunch. Uhhh so hungry.

>> I schedule my classes for next semester tomorrow. Shit. More on that once it's happened, but for now, a question I want everyone who reads this before 8AM tomorrow my time to answer: Should I take a colloquium on Joyce, which is early in the morning and no doubt insanely challenging, or a colloquium on Shakespeare which has a more convenient time but covers plays I've already studied? Should I punish myself in the name of education, or go easy since the rest of my projected schedule is already difficult? I know it's a hard one, but I'd like to hear your opinions... Comment!!! NOW!!!

>> It is seven o' fucking clock and I can't even begin to think about starting in on one of my papers. This is bad. Very bad. Sigh.

I find myself thinking in short bursts at the moment, so it's hard to fulfill the requirements of the "long-form posts" ethic I seem to have established on this side of the site. I knew this would happen. I blame Prol for infecting me with her "Blogger is better for quick posts" idea; I'd love to use MT for World In Motion since I could have comments and it wouldn't break all the time (I can't get it to publish today), but I just can't psychologically bring myself to do it. Sigh. I'm gonna try putting three Not Enough Of Me posts on the frontpage at any given time, so that I'm not reluctant to pop off entries back-to-back -- at the moment, I worry about shunting something off the page too soon. This should solve that, though it'll look less graceful.

And wow, my weblog used to be much better.

Aaaaand finally, I invite you to check out the resurrected Guberkov, my friend Cameron's blog hosted here at DYFL. He's only done one return post, so hopefully we won't give him performance anxiety, but I am looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.

>> One year ago today:

I could be more nervous right now, but I'm not quite sure how. And of course, I have no real reason to be -- but I am.

The previous weekend I had been introduced to one of Jeremy's friends from the film school, a guy named Josh. Along with Jeremy and Len (an obvious fixup for me and Josh disguised as a "friends hanging out" night), we saw Panic Room (I didn't mind it, he hated it) and had dinner. Two days later I summoned up the balls to call him up and ask him out. I'd never been on a date before in my life.

One year ago today, I put on a t-shirt, a black button-down dress shirt, and a pair of jeans I loved that I'd just bought a few weeks earlier on spring break in Florida. (I'm wearing them today, actually.) I met Josh outside his dorm at 7:00, I believe it was, and we had dinner at Bandito in the West Village before seeing Human Nature at the United Artists theatre in Union Square (I didn't mind it, he hated it). Afterwards we had coffee on MacDougal Street, I walked him back to his place, and I hugged him goodnight because I didn't have the balls to kiss him. I had actually never kissed anyone before in the romantic sense. A week later that would no longer be the case. And a year later we would still be together.

It's our first anniversary. It's been a bitch of a year for both of us, and we've had the expected rough spots, and we're still physically apart. But yes, we are still together, and yes, I am still in love. Happy first, baby.

>> Once again, I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe, writing actually is what I want to do with my life. Something about entertaining that idea feels different this time, though; maybe it's just the growing proximity to the moment of truth -- i.e., the removal of the "higher education" safety net -- but becoming a decent writer with the ability to generate a volume of respectable material is looking less like a nebulous ambition and more like a project, like something that could be physically done with an investment of time and mental resources.

The question that I need to answer, the same question that's always been hanging there, is whether or not those resources are available to me. In the short term, I know they're not. I'd love to capitalize on this heady feeling that I'm describing right now -- it's been nursed by doing a rather large amount of reading in the past week -- but I've got two ten-page research papers due on Monday and Tuesday and I just don't have the time to indulge the short-story impulse or anything of the sort. (On a quasi-related note, I did get into the advanced fiction workshop for next semester, so I'm guaranteed to have some form of laboratory environment to work in, which pleases me; here's hoping it's a good workshop though. I think I was spoiled by the excellent, excellent one I took last semester, which I've never really written about here). In the longer term, though, I do have this summer; now do I have the strength of will, perseverance, mental acuity, etc. to carry it off?

This sort of questioning comes back around every two weeks or so, and never gets answered because I never do anything to engage it when it rears its head other than writing posts like these. Unfortunately that's going to be the case again now. Being aware of my problems is not the same as fixing them, and somehow I keep forgetting that...

>> I've got a sore throat, which portends forthcoming illness, and I am not happy about that. But I'm gonna try to bang off a few more disconnected notes on the trip to Paris...

• On the way out on the Eurostar, all through Kent we kept passing little round farmhouse things with cones on top of them. Can an English person tell me what the story is with those?
  
  
• My pictures (which, hopefully, I'll start posting tomorrow) didn't turn out as excellent as I'd hoped. For starters, I seemed to have a real problem holding the camera level. And the lens is set too wide, so objects far away turn out a lot smaller in the photo than they were in real life. This has been bugging me for a while, but since I don't think I have the manual with me here in London, I haven't found out if there's anything I can do about it. This is bothersome, since I took quite a few "Isn't this an astonishing long-distance vista" snaps that weren't as impressive in the final result as they should have been...
  
  
• Grappling with the language was, again, a very weird experience. As I walked around the city (and I did that a lot), I would constantly be muttering to myself and turning phrases over in my head. Every thought I had, I tried to translate into French. Generally I'd stall out after five or six words (especially when I had to conjugate a non-basic verb in a non-basic tense). This bizarre mental state continued all the way back to London; moving through Waterloo and the Underground upon my return, I kept fighting the urge to say "Pardon" to the people I brushed past, and kept thinking I would need to speak French to anyone I encountered. That's a creepy, creepy headspace to be in.

In any event, a good time was certainly had. Like a total dumbshit I never met up with Bart, since we kept having phone miscommunications of some weird order -- I could never get through to anything except his voicemail and he couldn't get through to my mobile despite its seeming functionality on the SNF network. I should've been even remotely clever and just pre-arranged a metting time and place, but the thought never even occured to me until I was on the train home. Let this be a lesson to anyone who ever wants to coordinate something involving me.

Right then, now I have to write something like four ten-page research papers in a week. GURGLE. Pray for me.

(Oh, and while we're talking about international travel, can I just mention how much I've enjoyed Cormac's writing about his trip to America over at The Plastic Cat? Poke around in the last month's worth of posts, it's interesting stuff.)

>> A few notes on my (ongoing) jaunt to Paris:

• On the Eurostar train going out, I kept feeling a little rush of disappointment every time we entered a tunnel. "Wait, we're in the Chunnel already? That's it, no fanfare, no trumpets, no gawking at the world's most impressive engineering feat?" Then we'd emerge again somewhere in southeast London and I'd feel like a chump. (They did, in point of fact, announce our approach to the Chunnel shortly before we entered. And amusingly enough, the bilingual messages -- English first, then French -- spoken on the train's PA system inverted their order once we were through.)
  
  
• I had, at some point, managed to convince myself that Paris is quite small. I was wrong. It's smaller than London, but also much denser, as cliched as that sounds. And it's so fucking pretty it makes me want to die. (Londoners take note: brown rivers = not so cool. If you can do the Thames flood barrier, couldn't you have somethin' scrubbing out the water a few miles west of the city?)
  
  
• Uhhhhhh food uhhhhhh so good uhhhhhhh.
  
  
• I had, at some point, managed to convince myself that I could speak French. I was wrong. My first comical attempt at ordering a cheese sandwich (A CHEESE SANDWICH for God's sake! How simple can you get?) instantly prompted tongue-tiedness, confusion, and a reversion to English on the part of the nice man behind the counter with steel teeth.

There's undoubtedly more to say but I'm blanking at the moment. So I'm going to stew on it / forget what it was and get back to you.

>> I bought the new N.M.E. today, as is my wont most weeks. It pissed me off quite a bit.

On the cover they're hailing Radiohead's Hail To The Thief as "rock's greatest protest ever." This is obviously hyperbolic bullshit of the sort we expect from the N.M.E., nay, of the sort we demand from them -- somebody out there has got to be exuberant enough about music to look stupid occasionally. So we can even tolerate the pants-wettingly-funny article which posits the title as "an elegant act of mainstream subversion which may yet prove to be the most radical statement ever made by a multi-platinum act." But then there's the second page of the article, in which the magazine prints reader responses to the title. And these are the sorts of things that get me so angry that I want to BLOW UP THE FUCKING WORLD.

I'll start with the ridiculously easy, ducks-in-a-barrel argument: taking on the kind of twat who rants "Remember Thom, if it wasn't for us Americans and our 'corrupt' government, you'd be speaking German right now!" Yes, "us Americans" did a really great job fighting the Nazis, didn't we, YOU DUMBFUCK? I remember single-handedly butchering an entire S.S. regiment with nothing but my bare hands and, late in the fighting, the sheet music to John Phillip Souza's "The Star-Spangled Banner." Point being, we didn't do jack fucking shit to save Britain, you asshole -- people who were alive sixty years ago did. What makes you think that you or I, just because we have a blue passport with eagles on the front, can coast on their good fucking karma for the rest of our lives?!? America -- all countries -- absolutely should not be viewed simply as the sum total of their good and bad deeds, because those were deeds committed by people who are now dead, senile, fat, out of power, etc. What matters is what we are doing RIGHT NOW, our attitudes RIGHT NOW, and those, let's be frank, are petulant, childish, and very dangerous. Of course those are shaped by the past, and of course we shouldn't ignore it, but we shouldn't expect it to give us a magical ticket that says "It's OK, do what you want, because boy howdy you sure did win that Spanish-American War over a century ago!" And can I also point out that the application of this argument to a jingoistic anti-French sentiment is also patently absurd (obviously). Every time I see someone berating the French about our assistance in World War II and how they "owe" us, I just want to scream "LAFAYETTE, LAFAYETTE, LAFAYETTE! THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WOULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT THE FRENCH YOU BLISTERED, BLEEDING COCK!"

But as worked-up as I get over this sort of thing, that whole argument is actually beside the point. I set out writing this post to address One Of Those Things that everyone is talking about: what role celebrities can and should play in discussions about current events. The kind of thing that leads to statements like "I think artists these days are out of bounds expressing their political views just because they're famous" (a quote from the N.M.E. letters page).

Why are we even talking about this?!? Of COURSE quote-unquote "famous people" should be allowed to say whatever the fuck they want about anything they fucking want. That's a right you love and cherish as you sit in high school, or putter around behind a desk in a mid-level management position. Should that right vanish once you make some money and people recognize you on the street? NO! It's kind of despicable that for some reason we really don't think celebrities are human beings, that they are saying things "just because they are famous." They are "saying things" because they are human beings who live and eat and breathe and piss and shit and get scared and love other people and love their world and would rather not see anything bad happen to those things thank you very much, just like you. The collective psyche of the Western world truly appears to believe that "celebrities" or media figures at large are computer-generated entities which read from a script through a speech-simulator program, and therefore are not allowed to have hearts and minds and desires or anything so pedestrian and human. And before anyone tries it, the whole "they don't know enough about it" argument is utterly fallacious as well. Be honest here, how much do you know about the following?

• Islam and its contribution to regional and national government in the Middle East, and its links to the generation of political instability in the West;
• The politics of fascist dictatorships;
• The ramifications of nationalist unilateralism;
• Military strategy;
• Nation-building and its history, both generally and region-specific;
• The Cold War arms race;
• Arabian geography;
• The genealogies, political affiliations, and professional histories of all of the conflict's major actors;
• Other factors not listed.

Because in order to speak "authoritatively" about this war, in order to have "the right" to have an opinion, you would have to be an expert in all of these fields. And you are not. Nobody is. The people conducting this war are not experts in all of these fields, and that's why we HAVE this problem. Get over this concept of who has a "right" to speak, and accept that in any society which values free speech, individuals will value free speech and will therefore exercise it at moments of their own discretion. And just because a war switches from threats and political movements to declarations and troop movements, doesn't mean it's time to switch off your brain's "look critically at your world and talk about it" function and turn on the "stay at home silently in front of the TV with a pint of ice cream" lobe.

We're all allowed to talk about this, whether we live in a trailer or a mansion. We're all allowed to hate it or love it or just pray for it to end as soon as possible, and we'd all better keep talking to each other to figure out what the person next to us thinks, because otherwise we'll stop thinking about the person next to us when it's time to take action. That is what democracy is based on -- giving a fuck about what the people around you think, how they'll be hurt or helped by the things you, as an individual, would like to do. We're already dangerously close to giving up on the concept of caring about other human beings entirely, and if nobody pokes their head up and says "I am a human being and I have an opinion," we're going to forget why that's a problem.

>> Well now. THAT DIDN'T WORK OUT DID IT.

About fourteen hours before my flight was scheduled to leave, easyJet informed me that -- ha ha! -- my flight to Nice from Luton is cancelled, since the French air industry is apparently on a general strike tomorrow. GREAT. THAT RULES, GUYS. You know, last time I was in France in the summer of 2000, the Louvre employees and several other agencies were on strike. We were told this happened all the time. The phrase "Protestant work ethic" never made its way across the Channel, obviously.

Sooooo... I get a refund on my flight, but because I'm cancelling my hotel on such short notice, I get a one-night -- i.e., 50% of total -- fee. Grrrrrrrr. Nice is officially a dead end. I might as well still go to Paris, though; I'll just hop on the Eurostar Saturday morning. Assuming the rail workers don't strike.

This is all because I linked to that song from The Little Mermaid, isn't it? They hate that.

>> Hee-hee-hee, onh-honh-honh. With a significant financial investment and a wee bit of initiative, I'm off to Nice and Paris as of tomorrow, all by my lonesome (though I'll be meeting up with Bart and Michelle in Paris). I'm quite excited about it, especially about Paris, which I only got to see for a couple of very brief days back in the summer of 2000... mind you, this will once again only be a very short while -- Saturday afternoon, Sunday, and Monday morning -- but still. It's a beautiful thing. God, I hope my piss-poor knowledge of French is at least functional... how do you say "Forgive me, I am a stupid American and know not what I do, and don't worry, I hate our president as well" en francais?

(Still on the list of cities to see before I leave the U.K. next month: Dublin, Amsterdam, Barcelona. Should get cracking planning excursions to those, too.)

Now it's off to get a haircut (I look like a shaggy beast) and convert some currency into Oiros and I'll be ready to go. As long as I manage to wake up tomorrow morning at 5AM *choke* to catch the bus to Luton. Would a rail service be THAT hard, England? Honestly?

Expect photolog entries out the boo-tay upon my return... and GO BUY THE WHITE STRIPES ALBUM. IT IS VERY VERY GOOD.