Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: funny how

world war z

Just saw this terrorizing zombie flick which has Brad Pitt in it, he is rather good but every time he’s onscreen you go Oh look! It’s Brad Pitt! Such an awful experience and I feel traumatized. I feel like a zombie, if a zombie is the ultimate sociopath: no emotion, no response. Cycling home through the cool breezy night I was looking fearfully over my shoulder, left and right, cowering when a bus came past. Apart from fear I’m feeling nothing. Hackneyed exaggerations like ‘dead inside’ seem to me reasonable truisms. The friend I went with, a fan of zombie movies who found this gorefest ‘bloodless’, wants to know isn’t there any sensation of relief? What, that the movie is finally over? That of all the billions of diverse and pulsating people on this earth, one square-jawed blond actor and his immediate family, plus token brown-skinned boy, survived? This… is hope? All the nauseating violence and mean-skinned machine-gunning and desperate stratagems by ill-prepared people have worn me through. My emotions are spent. Then again it was melodramatic and ridiculous, but sore. I’ve never seen a film like this before and never want to again. It was so overwhelming that the nett result seems to me a sodden desensitization. Who made the word zombie, when was this thing dreamed up? Ugh. And only now, writing, do I realize the title of this terrible movie is literal as well as hyperbolic. How exhausting.

A side-note: Brad Pitt is extremely good-looking. I never really noticed it before. I guess that sounds ridiculous. I mean, he’s built well, he has a sturdy face that takes expression. My companion said: wasn’t there anything that you liked? I like that it’s over. I like that the artificial bowels-of-the-pyramid architecture of major cinemas does not prevail everywhere. I liked the girl who was brave when he cut her arm off. I found it amusing, or do I mean dispiriting, that they had four accountants just for payroll; 49 stuntpersons; five times as many digital effects artists. I liked the ice cream, from an Italian stall that was locked up when we came out. I liked taking off the 3D glasses. I like the quietude.

July 27, 2013
a bowl of apples

Cafe I used to work in, in Berlin, had sometimes a dozen Apple computers (mine included) lined apple to apple, cheek to cheek across the counters. People forget ‘branded’ is what they used to do to the rumps of cattle. To show they are *owned by somebody*. We think it means, “Now I Own This.”

‘Maverick’, incidentally, comes from the name of the one guy who refused to burn brands into his cattle. So when a steer turned up who had no sign of ownership, they knew: one’s a maverick. But for all those who so proudly claim the term: still means you are somebody’s property. It’s just that the chains are invisible.

July 10, 2013
or anything but

“I’m not racist or anything, but… [racist remark]”

vs: “I’m not a feminist or anything, but [women are people too.]”

Why is it still embedded in our use of language that we need to apologize for opposing hatred of women the same way we need to apologize for hating people of other races?

July 7, 2013
hero, shero

Are ignorance & arrogance the same thing? I think they are. My friend and I argue. He says, ignorance goes inside, arrogance goes towards the outside. Yes I say; but as you destroy your ignorance, as you realize we are all connected and part of one another, it becomes impossible to be arrogant. (Arrogantly I am thinking: I’m not arrogant!) Well but then, he says, you become cynical. And then… you become sarcastic. I’m not cynical, I remind him (arrogantly). No, he says: you’re not. And you’re not ignorant.

I am preening. But! he suddenly realises: you are far more arrogant than me! Yes, I say proudly, it’s true, I am. I’m a horrible snob. You have Adelbrain, he says, synthesising a new German-English compound: aristocrat’s brain. I have no money and come from a family of farmers but I realise: this is true. Leaving the room he says over his shoulder: No. You’re not arrogant. You’re just a queen. Perching four splayed fingers over his breastbone like an insect walking on an upright wall of water he explains: Birthright.

Queen Latifah, I have heard, calls herself so because she believes every woman is a queen. Similarly I began in my 20s signing my name Cathoel Shero, having made up the word ‘shero’ to serve as an equal opposite to ‘hero.’ Here’s a cartoon I made for it in 1999. In my mind I was imagining every woman signing herself Sarah, Blessed, Dewi, Dagmar Shero: a race of super women. I thought by recognising the dignity in ourselves and calling it out, being unafraid of our strength, we could call up men all around us to be heroes. Kings and princes. Titles would be common as muck. We’d all be happy as pigs in straw castles. My theory fell to pieces when I discovered Oprah Winfrey had invented the same word around the same time and instead of feeling pleased ~ the light is rising! ~ I was annoyed. This self-centring response felt not very sheroic; not very princely. But I like to be queen of my own inner world and I like that other people are king and queen of theirs.

June 27, 2013
Germaniac

Favourite German-English idiomcy of the week: a friend confesses to ‘bunch-watching.’ That’s when you borrow an entire season of some tv show on dvd and watch the lot.

Favourite personal neologism of the night: idiomcy. I didn’t have the right word (it’s not exactly ‘mistranslation’) and didn’t want to insult my friend’s English. As I typed, out it came.

I guess his invention can be applied in all sorts of ways. Bunch-drinking. Bingey-jumping. The Brady Binge, a story of blended families.

June 27, 2013
smoosh-smoosh

A German friend trying to understand a phone call from a Polish colleague just asked me could I stop typing… as I was rattling away at a fine old pace and it was very distracting. I learned to type on an old manual typewriter where you had to exert actual pressure to get the keys to move… so my typing is, he has said, like “a herd of gazelle.” Afterwards he apologized, in faulty idiom. “I didn’t mean to smoosh-smoosh you.” “Ah it’s ok. You can shush-shush me. I know I get overexcited, writing.”

June 21, 2013
just married

Last night I had occasion to take a taxi and struck the cab driver from hell. Well, hell is an understatement: he was from purgatory. Drove with his hands in the air as he banged on to me about greenies and their so-called eco crisis, a plot to make money.

I couldn’t help it, I laughed in his face. “Gee, sorry. I think if I was out for a quick buck I’d be in oil wells, not solar panels.” “And what about palm oil?” he ranted. “All it’s doing is making money for the Indonesians.”

You can always tell, when someone lumps a group of people together and prefixes with “the”, there is hatred involved. Or at the very least, disrespect. “Palm oil’s not green,” I said. We charged down the streets. I changed the subject three times. “Isn’t it a wonderful night?” (It was.) “Have you been working long this evening?”

All ruses led back to Rome, and the Fall. He was breathing heavily with rage. Meantime an iridescent something had appeared in the road in front of us, it seemed to be some kind of fine streamer whickering in the air – “Did they just get married, you think?” I asked, pointing.

The car on the right had the same gleaming trail. “I think maybe they both just drove through an old cassette tape,” said the driver, and he was right. Long loops of glorious analog spurled through the air, dancing with light and with movement, a magic. He started talking about fisheries, how ridiculous it is to have quotas: because who is going to explain to the fish that they must not swim into the net? I wasn’t listening, I was watching the wind. The scarf that bore Isadora Duncan to heaven had unfurled itself from the car in front and whipped round the passenger-side mirror, inches from my hand. I unwound the window to let the night in. So beautiful, so triste. Because no matter how we block each other out – by hating greenies, by not listening to taxi drivers – sooner or later life slings its tendrils like lassos around our hearts and we have to wind the window down and let the night in.

June 18, 2013
Game of Drones

Just watched the opening episodes of Game of Thrones. Until recently I imagined it was a video game: a world all but invisible to me. Turns out it’s a television series.

Melodrama. It’s a kingdom of sighs, and costume. I’ve never seen such a celebration of unthinking brutality. Well, not since A Clockwork Orange. It doesn’t just document, it glories: beheadings, rapes, all filmed in lingering detail. A small boy is pushed out of a window off-handedly. The script is littered with casual misogyny. A man wakes up among his dogs and his enemy sneers, “Better-looking than the bitches you’re usually with.” “Soon enough that child will spread her legs and start breeding.” “Thank the gods for Bessie, and her tits.”

The kingdom is populated entirely by supermodels. There’s a lot of modern slang and the bad characters and good characters have neon signs above their heads. The good have an edge of self-pitying martyrdom, the bad have sensation instead of feeling. If there ever is a dystopian future in which this kind of glamorized yet boring reconstruction of some imagined medieval past holds sway, people like me will either be queens or court jesters or we won’t last very long.

June 15, 2013
for quitters

I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the rainy window like tears, I experienced coffee grievings. Coffee, you sweet sorrow, you sultry wench.

June 7, 2013
I am god.

A friend of mine driving her nephew and niece said, they were arguing in the back. One of them had a goldfish that had died. Girl, 3, asked, But why do we die? She kept asking. And if we die, why do we live?

Finally her brother (4) said, exasperated, Joanna don’t you geddit? We’re all just trying to become god. (There was a pause. Then my friend said he said): And I already am.

June 6, 2013