…

If you need me, I’ll be, ah, um, having a big glass of cold water and breathing heavily.

You might have possibly noticed that I love Charlotte Gainsbourg, and my love for her was the reason I went to watch “Persécution”, her latest movie, directed and written by Patrice Chereau, the author of “Intimacy”. Which I have never seen, and so I wasn’t prepared for what I was going to see.

I actually confused Chereau with Francois Ozon. (Hangs head in shame.) I expected a pretty movie, and the fact that I read an interview with Chereau about it (still not realising it wasn’t Ozon) confused me further, as it didn’t sound pretty at all. It sounded like a dark psychological drama. And what I got was a slice of life, way too realistic to be enjoyable.

The movie was boring. I found myself checking the time every now and then. But despite the boredom, the movie was also amazing. And depressing. Because, you see, Chereau captured a chunk of real life. Which is, sometimes, completely fucked up.

There were four of us watching: my ex, my 18-year-old bro, a female friend who had her own share of painful breakups and me. My bro didn’t agree there was anything realistic about the movie; in fact, he made a distinct impression of someone who just watched a film about mating habits of aliens. The other three of us were very quiet; the girl even cried later. Because, unlike my brother, we have all seen enough life to relate to Sonia, Daniel, Michel and even “the freak”. We have all loved too much, been loved too much, we have all grabbed the legs of someone who didn’t want us and begged them to love us because we couldn’t imagine taking another breath if they said no. And we all survived, with scars all over our faces to prove our fresh toughness.

The people in the movie aren’t nice. Oh, I’m sure they are nice in CERTAIN ways — Sonia is probably very sweet for her workmates, Daniel is kind to the old people he visits (for his personal reasons, but I don’t think it matters to them why he does it, as long as he doesn’t stop), Michel is helpful and kind. But most of what they do to each other is purely motivated by egoism and fear. Each of them ends up hurting the people who love them. Each of them uses those people for their own purposes. Each has a fear, a complex that stops them from being able to be happy. And each of them is painfully relatable to. I wish I could say “oh, I’ve never acted like that asshole Daniel”, but thing is, that wouldn’t be true.

Apparently “Persécution” is a bad movie for Chereau’s standards. In this case, I am not sure I dare to watch “Intimacy”, which is apparently similar, but much better. I’ve found out things about myself from “Persécution” I didn’t want to know.

Oooh, it’s like a chain post. How cool is that. I hope some people will join. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Q&A is here and it’s lovely, and here is mine. (Yes, I am bored. How did you know?)

When were you happiest?
When I was 22, and I broke up with someone, and it was summer, and a gorgeous sunny day, and I felt beautiful, young and free. Just as Meryl Streep in The Hours, I thought this was just the beginning of happiness and there would always be more; I didn’t realize that was happiness, just there and then. I never felt like that again.

What is your greatest fear?
Long, debilitating, painful illness killing me before I’m quite ready to go.

What is your earliest memory?
Drinking mulled beer with my grandfather when electricity and heating were off, and thinking it tastes absolutely gross. I was five or six, I think.

Which living person do you most admire?
Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Trying too hard.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Pretentiousness.

What was your most embarrassing moment?
Forgetting lyrics of a very well known song while performing on the stage at a charity benefit. That song was meant to be the centerpiece of my performance, and in a way it was.

What is your most treasured possession?
I don’t really have any material things that I would feel like that about. Data on my hard disk is the most important thing I have. I started making backups a while ago, and I can recommend that to everyone.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
My hairline.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
My youth. (Hello, Charlotte. Didn’t know you were as vain as me.)

What is your favourite smell?
Burning wood. It makes me feel 13. I would be perfectly happy to spend all evenings sitting in front of a fire on my own and doing nothing else, just staring into the fire and smelling it.

Cat or dog?
Cat.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Beer. I am an evangelist for healthy living and strict nutritional values, but I never met a Belgian beer I didn’t like.

What do you owe your parents?
Everything and nothing. I could write a book as a reply to this one and it still wouldn’t be enough.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?
To my grandmother, who died years ago, and I never told her I was gay, because I was scared she’d either have a stroke or just reject me. So as a result I never gave her a chance, and that lowered her chances considerably.

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
is tempted to say Kele Okereke Arnold Schwarzenegger, Madonna and Mike Oldfield. People, who had a dream, and then made it come true, without letting their lizard brains stop them.

What is the worst job you’ve done?
Writing a book. I swear there wasn’t a point of my life since I turned 15 that I wasn’t working on a book, yet I never managed to finish one.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?
I would have moved to Amsterdam waaaaaaaaaay earlier.

When did you last cry, and why?
Two weeks ago, while watching “Rachel Getting Married”, I cried because her husband loved her for exactly who she was, rather for who she could become once he’s finished improving her.

What is the closest you’ve come to death?
I was in the hospital with hepatitis and apparently my liver marker values were twice as high as those of people who actually died because of it.

What keeps you awake at night?
Having too many thoughts in my head at once. Oh shit, I just finished having a coffee! Well, now I know what will keep me awake at night tonight.

What song would you like played at your funeral?
I used to have a whole playlist, morbidly enough, and now I can’t remember any of it. Let’s say “Together Again” by Janet Jackson for the time being. I like the idea of having a joyful song about death.

How would you like to be remembered?
As a very happy person.

Your turn, my lovelies, and please don’t disappoint me — I love you all dearly and can’t wait to read your answers!

• Miss Bartender
• Hannah
• Good Pup
• Shoebox Dweller (you expected this one dear, didn’tcha)
• A1 (you didn’t expect this one dear, didya)

(I wrote this post on Thursday evening, but due to internet problems didn’t quite manage to post it until now. ‘Apols.’)

*

What an odd week this was. Well, still is. But the remaining bit will, luckily, be more normal.

On Monday, a national holiday here in Holland, I travelled to a town called Deventer, where on Tuesday I attended a Social Media Crash Course with Thomas Power. It was a very interesting experience; in fact, while during the course itself I rated the experience 7/10, after thinking about it for a while I would now score it at least 9/10. It has changed my viewpoints of social media — and it has given me completely unexpected food for thought in form of the discovery of my core process, which proved to be “building independence”.

It is a very fascinating experience to work with a person you have never met before and you might never meet again and discuss the most personal experiences of your life, then have them assess those experiences in front of you, and refining your driving force to those two words — building independence — and then all of a sudden you feel: yes. That’s what it is, and that’s what it always was.

All of a sudden I felt a stronger person; suddenly put in contact with what is my driving force and what has always been it, even if I didn’t know it or actively denied it. The choice of the word “building” rather than “creating” is not accidental; building is a tough physical job, which gives you bleeding fingers and a high risk of injury, and sometimes you have to destroy what you have built and start again. But at the end of that process is a house. And there is hardly anything more substantial than a person can own or create than a house.

On Wednesday I travelled, for a change, to London to take part in a Networking Masterclass course. While the approach to networking as a process that takes place mostly at specially held networking events was, to me, a bit… unrealistic (perhaps it depends on the job — a graphic designer can network anywhere and everywhere, which I have proved by handing out a card to someone who might become a business contact later) the course has showed me something — again — very unexpected: it has showed me how people see me.

A part of the course involved describing other people (after having known them for whole two hours) and having them describe you — the first impressions they got from seeing you and listening to you talk. And describe they did. Two out of three deemed me extrovert; they added cheerful, powerful, witty and intelligent. A connected task was marking the character traits that you believe you possess; I marked introvert and shy.

It got me thinking: am I really introvert and shy? Or do I just create a fake limitation for myself by telling myself that I am? I have approached Michael Franti at a concert, got his autographs, got myself introduced to his band members and his son, and at the end of the show Michael jumped off the stage and gave me a very sweaty, very exhilarating hug. Was I being shy when I went to talk to him? I made Thomas Power do the core process exercise which he asked others to do; I insisted until he did it, and after the course ended he said to me I was the first person in twelve years to have even dared to ASK him to do it. Was I being shy then? Last weekend, when the sun was shining, I called a friend and invited him out for drinks, and we had a lovely time, and at the end of the day he thanked me for that because, he said, otherwise he would spend the whole day hidden in his room. Was I being introvert when I asked him out?

Perhaps I had a skewed image of myself all the time. Perhaps I limited my life for years with no other reason or purpose than to prove to myself that I am a shy person. Perhaps I have gone very, very far in creating an image of myself that wasn’t true. At the course today, at the very beginning, I thought: those people don’t know I am a shyster who at parties stands on his own staring into his wine glass. For what they know I am a short-haired bloke dressed in black. That’s about all they know. I can try and be a cheerful, friendly soul of the party kind of person during this course. And I was. And the person that would in all other circumstances be the one I would never dare to speak of? He asked my card at the end of the course, and he’s the one that I might end up working with.

I think I built some more independence — from my own assumptions, expectations and fake boundaries — today. And my fingers didn’t bleed for a second.

Tracey Thorn, specifically, being interviewed:

I had a great holiday in Mykonos with a recently divorced girlfriend. We looked across the sea to the little island of Delos, and not a cloud appeared for a week, and the men at the hotel were all gay, so it was perfect, not a care in the world.

That made me think: where would a gay man in similar situation go? Somewhere full of straight men? Hmmm. Like where? Vatican? (HOHOHO SEE WHAT I DID THERE)

…because obviously I have WAY TOO MUCH TIME on my hands and I update this one so bloody often…

…anyway the idea is to do covers of record covers and this is the first one.

Amusing? Pointless? Silly? All of those?

The Lady GaGa video (two more people feel about it the way I do!) is just one of the many inventive ways in which thirtysomethingness continues to be catching up with me.

I swear I haven’t planned to become one of those people who mutter sentences starting with “those yoof of today”. Who get irritated by loud music playing at fashion retailers. And then they get irritated by the fact that all t-shirts seem to have juvenile prints on them (really? there are girls who would go for a bloke wearing a t-shirt saying “FUCKING GENIUS” with 12 pictures of various positions underneath? or a t-shirt saying “I RECYCLE GIRLS”?). And then as they walk home they see two teenagers in very lowly pulled pants — starting below their buttocks more or less — and they roll their eyes and go “jesus, what in the Alexander McQueen HELL are they wearing”.

Nevertheless, that’s exactly what I have become.

I listen to the Music Of Today and roll my eyes thinking “this has been done before, and so much better as well”. I realise it’s irrelevant, because pop music has never been about originality, and that it has never been aimed at thirty-somethings, but I can’t help it: it HAS been done before, and it HAS been done better. Which is why I can’t possibly enjoy Lady GaGa the way most of her uber-loyal disciples do. And because I hate stupidity in lyrics, I can’t possibly chart Ke$ha. Or Black Eyed Peas.

Then I look at my vinyl collection. And that’s even before I look at my CD collection. After carefully removing all the CDs I will never play again from the shelves and sticking them in a box (because I can’t possibly make myself throw them away) I ended up with 700+ CDs. I paid very good money for a lot of them. Almost none of them are worth that money anymore. Yet an iTunes download of the same music sometimes costs more than the CDs with thick, nicely printed booklets. Physicality of the object, thus, became a con rather than pro, and I can’t help but think those yoof of today are voluntarily getting screwed. (Except of course they have the last laugh, because they don’t REALLY pay for downloads.) Which doesn’t change the fact that it is me who has invested shitloads of money into CDs which right now aren’t really that much more than a waste of space.

The current H&M collection features jeans shirts, jeans jackets and jeans tops, last seen in the 1980s. I don’t only remember 1980s, I also remember the shame with which we laughed at the pictures only a few years later. What would make that stuff fashionable again? Oh yes — the yoof of today, who don’t yet realise the embarrassment they will feel next year when looking at the pictures they take today.

Movies made today? A very large part of them is either visual extravaganza without a plot whatsoever or badly acted remakes of movies made 30 years ago whose only fault is the fact that it’s impossible to add product placement to them. The remaining few are, perhaps, good — but the time it takes to separate the dross from the amazing? Who has that time in the age of information when you need to get a live feed of your neighbour’s cat’s bowl contents?

Those yoof of today get served shit on a golden platter. And they, ultimately, are the winners, because both them and me are force-fed the same excuse for entertainment, but I am a bitter old queen mumbling about “the Old Days used to be so much better you know” while they actually enjoy themselves.

I have just spent 9 minutes and 30 seconds of my life watching Lady GaGa’s “Telephone” video. See it below.

I have then gone to Popjustice forums to see what the people were thinking, and predictably enough I saw fans tripping over themselves to express their excitement. Amazing! Great! Ambitious! Nudity! Fabulousness! “The most amazing video I have ever seen!”

It does make me both feel and sound old, but… it isn’t. Nudity? Why not check out Mylene Farmer’s “Beyond My Control”, made in 1991. Violence and fast cars? Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For A Girl”. Colours and sixties styling? “Beautiful Stranger”. Dance scenes in prison? “Chicago” the musical did those waaaay better. Lesbian overtones? Very exciting to see, but really, L Word did those in a way less offensive way. (Not offensive as in “two girls kiss SHOCKER”, offensive as in male-fantasy-about-lesbians way.)

I made the mistake of posting my opinion and, unsurprisingly, got flamed for that. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but really? This passes for groundbreaking, amazing and incredible these days?

I feel ancient.

I still stand by every sentence of my “Joe Sent Me” review: it is a magical, mysterious album, full of smoke, poetry, sexuality, adultness, beauty and did I mention poetry yet? Yes I have.

Since the (self-produced) “Joe Sent Me” Vanessa released a collection of remixes called “Daouhaus” and a podcast called “Love Among the Shadowed Things”. None of them are as essential as “Joe Sent Me” but both expand the image of the sultry songstress (lazy writing on my part — she’s been referred to as “sultry songstress” approx. 837154 times in the past) who has a past ranging from dance/house music through jazz through pop to pure and simple spoken word poetry. Before “Joe Sent Me” I thought of Vanessa as a singer with gorgeous voice; now I think of her as a fully realised, multi-talented artist. When I grow up, I want to be like Vanessa.

…or referral fun time y’all!

MONDAY
locker room sweat smell vid gay
Um, really? Not this kind of blog. You should be ashamed of yourself.

TUESDAY
how to become a totally different person
This is a very good question. I can quote George Michael in reply — “I changed my name/to get rid of the things that I want from you/it’s strange/but a name is a name, and truth is the truth”.

WEDNESDAY
teenager with baggy pants
Oh! Yes! That’s how most people describe me. “Ray, you know — that teenager with baggy pants”. Totally me.

THURSDAY
kissmysmellyfeet.com
I swear it is not a website I visit. Often. Erm. *erases history* You have no proof whatsoever!!!

FRIDAY
i am skinny but feel guilty when i eat
I only have that when I eat pizza. I managed to solve that problem by not eating pizza. I am not joking.

SATURDAY
fat kid eating pancakes
I swear I am not a fat kid eating pizza. Pancakes! I meant pancakes dammit!!! *nervously adjusts baggy pants*

SUNDAY
eating pancakes
For Morrissey’s sake. *throws a hissy fit, then goes to make some pancakes*

Good night y’all…