Welcome

After months of nagging, mum and dad have finally had a broadband connection set up. Now they can read my blog entries, get to know a new and murky, glittering, blossomy, gradated side of me.

Hello mum and dad! Welcome to fast internet connections.
Watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBgf2ZxIDZk

The images have been altered and looped to match the beats of the song. Great.
Plus, it's me in the train, coming to visit you in England!!

xx

kthxbai

Daan is using a website of cat photographs with 'humorous' captions to get his morning pick-me-up. He's given up coffee.
Captions like 'kthxbai'.

Meltdown

Benjamin's little fucking beaming face, tousled blond hair, slight trace of snot under his nose, tiny teeth as I left him at the creche in the arms of an employee,
melted my heart.

Banoffi disaster

Marnix flipped the banoffi pie over onto the tablecloth. I was, briefly, livid. I thought he'd done it on purpose.

"What the fuck, Marnix?!"

He disappeared into the downstairs toilet and it was explained to me that he hadn't done it on purpose.

I apologised and gave him a big slice (which happened to be the bit stuck to the tablecloth after the flipping).

I am concerned about my swearing. The dessert was created in 1972 by British chefs Ian Dowding and Nigel Mackenzie. Dowding is adamant that a pastry base be used, not a biscuit base.

kutlul

There's no way I as a junior school boy (of 8 or 9) would have called a peer (or my brother Jacob, let alone Daniel, who was in nappies at the time) cunt cock (kut lul)

When did I learn to swear?
I recall being shocked when Uncle Paul said 'fuck' during a walk.
I was 16.
Now i swear too much

cunt cock fuck shit piss arse

The Anglo-Saxon ones are the best, though perhaps 'piss' comes from a Romance language.

My kids hear me swear I'm afraid. They copy and that's not good but I do tell them not to use the f-word.

"You're not old enough to use that word" I say "kutlul"

Ted Hughes's poetry conveys the force of Anglo Saxon words brilliantly. He used many short, frequently monosyllabic words, words which are concrete, compact and full of force and violence. Sometimes these words do battle with the Latinate words


Here's a poem of his:


Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.


I wonder if he swore a lot. Cunt.

2 songs simultaneously - more mash please

Now it's Thomas Bangalter and Bookah Shade mix.

Both great but together like kids seeing who can shout the loudest or dance the fastest.

Actually, this a great mash too. The tracks clash in just the right way.

"Indeed" (Omar)

Heron Scratch Heron

As I listened to Micheal Jackson ('She's Out Of My Life') last.fm and an RA podcast by Bookah Shade simultaneously, a heron flew over the P building, as if obeying an inner command, not given by the Sith. Now Burt Bacharach ('Bond Street') is on last.fm. Techno with pop, nice mash.

Mmm cheesey. Herb Alpert on trumpet?
Check it out.
Pure 1960s

Transluv Airlines

After the gig in Zaal 16, I went up to the guys in the band to tell them how much I had enjoyed the gig. I did not say that the music and especially the singing had reminded me strongly of Mark E. Smith and The Fall.

It is not always necessary to seek reassuring comparisons.

John Peel described 'The Fall' as "always the same, always different."

Transluv Airlines is a magnificent antidote to singer-songwriter music, should one need such an antidote. The antidote to Transluv Airlines is probably not music but lying in a meadow with wild flowers tickling your ears and lazy bees fumbling about, or lying face down in damp sand with the sun on your bare arse.

I am not sure that formal diction will cut it, when I am trying to say shit.

Piss shit arse fuck cunt cock.

Transluv Airlines

mixed feelings - an intensely boring diary entry

In conversation with Mark and Linda, I remarked "I have mixed feelings about that" with regard to something I now no longer remember. A work-related topic, an incident, etc. This remark about mixed feelings was uttered just after the waitress had brought our bill.

Perhaps she thought that I was saying I had mixed feelings about paying the bill. What is more likely, however, is that she understood my remark as belonging to another conversational context than paying the fucking bill.

I had no strong feelings about paying the bill, or my share of it.

mixed salad
mixed metaphor
mixed race
mixed-up

Commentary

Sometimes, drunk, I talk myself through the making of a late night snack. "We slice the bread and put it in the toaster, we take the cheese...."

Not reminding or guiding but heightening the performance of the food.

Rhubarb

I had to snap a kilo of rhubarb stems in order for them to fit into a plastic bag. They didn't snap clean. The dark pink skins frayed.

Cock

At the Whatnight gallery event yesterday evening at Wilhelminapark 53, one performance art exhibit was a man in a long curly silver wig standing on a small black podium, naked and with what I assumed was a Viagra-induced erect penis. I could not help but assess the size of the cock and I wondered if other people were also doing this.

I laughed when I first saw him. The wig and the poses he struck and the tattoos on his shaved groin (and of course his boner) reminded me strongly of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, an example of which I have placed above.

A choir used to rehearse in a cupboard in the corner of the hall.

race

2 guys just raced each other down / up the not sure what I should call it.

concourse
terrain
campus
stretch
area

I was in my office listening to music.

They picked up their jackets and walked off. I would like to see more races at the UvT.

Last year on holiday in the Ardennes, a Belgian brother and sister raced past our tent for a week, puffing their chests out. The sister always won but the brother kept on trying.

Bees

I'm extremely envious of Willem's new T-shirt bearing the logo / text:

Honey Bees Cleveland.

When he has outgrown it I might cut out the text and sew it into one of my T-shirts. But I might not do this, since it would deny Benjamin the chance to wear Cleveland Honey Bees when he is big enough.

But at the moment I do not need to decide one way or the other; Willem will wear the T-shirt at least until the autumn, is my guess.

in Sickness and in Health

My wife gave me the middle finger in the street.
"Did you just give me the middle finger?"
"No!"
"Did you just give me the middle finger? Did you? Did you?"

Pink

Emmelie painted the kitchen pink. This was something we hadn't discussed. She just did it while the boys were at school and I was at work.
I was non-commital in my response. My jury is still out on this one. The boys, however, are pissed off. They being at that stage where pink is sissy. They being boys.

Monkeys on acid, as Dennis leary once described his kids, often applies to my brood.