say, will you ever ever ever know, ever ever ever fly away?
I am so le tired.
Spain has gas issues, and I'm not referring to any that would be produced by, say, fabada asturiana. By our estimates, based on what we've seen on the news, something like 25 Spaniards seem to bite the dust each year, by way of gas poisoning. Death comes rather comfortably, in the form of a minor gas leak in the kitchen stove, or perhaps from the radiator, and these folks pass into the great unknown painlessly, simply falling asleep with nary a though other than, "Oy [that's a Cockney 'Oy', not a Yiddish ouch/consternated-'Oy'], 'smells a bit funny."
Far more spectacular, however, are about half as many Spaniards who also expire by the same means, though not the ends - I speak of course, of the lovely folk who fall unfortunate victims to the all-too-frequent death "trend" of blowing themselves to smithereens due to an undetected influx of gas. Just this morning I arose (ridiculously early) to the fucking-fantastic images of a narrow Madrid apartment building, very much like my own, missing the top two of its three floors. It's okay - miraculously, the only people who were home were on the bottom floor, and apparently there was no one on the street when it happened (around 7 a.m.); 10 cars were crushed by the falling...upper stories...and an old man was slightly toasted, but everyone is really ok. The images, though, are totally shocking / hilarious, because it is so insanely crazy that not only would this building just blow up, but on top of it, no one is, you know, dead. You can see a video report of the event here, and then you can laugh, because it's fucking crazy, totally absurd, partially Pythonesque that somehow, by the grace of some divine intervention, everyone is totally cool.
You can also laugh because it is from TeleMadrid, our local sensationalist station, which went on to make it the lead story of the day, despite the fact that there were fairly important national issues going on. Not for TeleMadrid though - it's ALL MADRID, ALL THE TIME. So, in response to the event, TeleMadrid organized a special hour-long round-table discussion to talk about the persistent dangers of gas explosions which, according to TeleMadrid, "are a leading threat to the lives of Spaniards". Which, once you get to know Spaniards, would make sense - Dalí was not barking up the wrong tree: this nation, as a whole, is just that charmingly random and absurd. You'll also laugh (or ought to) because the video report features TeleMadrid's favourite interviewees, which are also its target audience: old, scandalized, bathrobe-clad Spanish women. And, oh my, what with that building blowing up across the street, they are mighty scandalized. And bathrobe-clad.
I'm not really sure why, but all this talk about explosions got me thinking about the pacific island of Karakatoa, which suffered a number of particularly shocking and random volcanic eruptions, resulting in the following (sorry, but again - HILARIOUS) geographic timeline:
I'm intrigued to know if anyone else read The 21 Balloons by William Pene Dubois when they were little? It dealt with the explosion in a fairly imaginative, utopian-retrospective sort of way, and was mighty fine / cool. Or atleast I remember it having been so in third grade. Yeah.
Vut elze? Eh...I've been painting like a madman for the past two weeks, and that is both lovely and amazing.
I went to bed around midnight last night, woke up at 6, and decided to stay up, which was good, because I spent the rest of the morning wandering about and eventually making it down to campus. On the way, I saw the partial solar-eclipse, which was cool, though I really will have no excuse if my eyesight keeps declining, what with my staring at the sun. (Still, it was worth it.) I watched Delicatessen at the Videothéque, and it was really, really fun, and dark, and very much Jeunet. I love how Jeunet is a master of caricature...some of them are really two-dimensional, but they are so perfectly so (i.e., the suicidal woman in Delicatessen) that you can't help grinning with delight. Anyway, you should all see it, the production / costume design is quite wonderful, and the plot is fairly hilarious and really, really dark (can't emphasize this enough). Dark enough, even, to have left me with the same sensation that I had after watching 28 Days Later. Delicatessen deals with a post-apocalyptic society in which people are reduced to an extreme every-man-for-himself mentality (I'm not giving away spoilers by saying this). I find the whole concept rather terrifying, and I hope that I will never find myself in a situation in which society as an entity and social structure ceases to exist. I'm not positive as to how to describe the sensation, save it being much like a feeling of acute distress that accompanies a dusk without electricity - I mean, the sensation that accompanied the post-Katrina week in the Gables, when it looked like a complete ghost-city at dusk, with the destruction and the total abandonment, silence, isolation...I suppose that the post-apocalyptic world would be only an extreme version of that...and this is terrifying. I realize it will never happen, and that I'm talking about a zombie-related topic (and that I do this more frequently than most, and that I find this really funny / bizarre), but I'm not sure that I wouldn't take the way out that the parents chose in 28 Days Later. There is something about the feeling that one is being hunted which would leave me probably wanting to choose any other option rather than having the end reach me huddled in a corner, hysterically waiting for the rapidly-approaching moment when one will be caught.
Wow, that was practically a Virginia Woolf-type level of randomness there.
Other things I liked about the movie: 1) The premise that, even in a post-apocalyptic world, the French cannot live without the butcher shop, or the resident whore; 2) That the movie is a totally obvious metaphor of Vichy France; 3) The theme that, even in that post-apocalyptic world, people are largely self-obsessed, and easily distracted by minutiae.
Today is my mother's birthday; joyeux anniversaire, maman.
Fuck. That means Txikia's is...sooooon? Fuck. I have it written down somewhere. I need to find my agenda from Germany. It's definitely scrawled in there.
I've become a master at making Lemonade.
I really enjoyed Wonder Boys; I want to re-watch The Game (only because it really has been awhile, and I liked it, however implausible it was).
I went to a Sociology lecture at the Circulo de Bellas Artes tonight. It was totally crap. The lecturer was an ass, both as a person, and in terms of his ideology. Really, I'm not kidding - I'm up to fucking here with the communists. You have no idea how FUCKING OBNOXIOUS they are, especially with this whole "denying Stalinism was bad" thing they've got going. Bargh.
People in class are trying to bed me, and that's fucking ridiculous and not going anywhere in a really good way.
In a week's time, I'll be in Paris, and that’s exciting exciting. I hope the strikes continue; I'd rather like to see student turmoil and random acts of idiocy on the part of the masses.
Unnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd...yeah.
(Fuck.)
Yeah!
(Cursing, oh my; what a verysilly update.)
Hurrah!
Bed.
End.