Sleeping and Coughing at the TSO

The Toronto Symphony Orchester was up to their usual quality last Thursday with an interesting mixture of Stravinsky, Mozart and Rachmaninoff. While I enjoyed the first part to some extext, it was during the second half that I began to doze off and succeeded in completely losing consciousness a couple of times. Yes, the orchester does make me fall asleep. I'm not so much a snob like I might guess the man sitting in the balcony with the white gloves and a wife adorned in furs. If we were to talk I imagine he would come up with the most inane nonesense about the brilliance of the variations in the third theme at the second minute of the fourth movement.

I was reminded while listening to the spaces in between the music of another sort of brilliance. For those who haven't heard of the comic, Loriot, it's a great shame. While most of his work requires some knowledge of German, his skit, Hustensymphonie (Cough Symphony) doesn't. It's delightfully international and extraordinarily intelligent. It's for all of you who have suppressed your cough until after the last stanza.

Sadism? Masochism? Isn't there a third way?

thanks to freud and the titilation of his theories - leading plenty of innocent film theorists to model spectators on castration fears, fetishism and voyeurism. and yes it is trap for the feminist film theorist. the femme is missing in a tree grown in the soil of the Marquis de Sade. she is nothing but an article to be discarded.

we forgot sacher-masoch in the penis-whirl around freud. sacher-masoch, the writer of venus in furs - an account if anything of a woman desired and using that power to enslave a man. she of course succumbs in the end to a man more dominant than her, but she does whip poor gregor into his love-frenzy and holds all the reins of power throughout their relationship. do we then have a female gaze, a female spectatorship?

 perhaps you will think me sick, but what if I throw the child into this mix. the post-genital discovery, but pre-freud penis-envying, castration-anxiety girl-boy. in those years when similarities are far greater than differences. in a time when the imagination molded reality. when women could be heroes and not just manipulative harlots.

hard to see but just visible is a little boy mannequin staring at these just unwrapped lingerie mannequins. who's dominating who?

The Hate Circuit

Could it be that it's more normal to loathe others than ourselves? Apparently, the scientists have discovered a circuit in the brain responsible for hating. When someone becomes depressed, that circuit decouples and hating others turns to hating ourselves.

I wonder if my circuit was lighting up today, when I opened the door to a group of thirty something women in tight bright dresses and smelling of cigarettes and booze. I was trying desparately not to be judgemental and put the hate on, but I wasn't feeling too friendly either. I don't particularly like letting in people - perhaps its my own paranoia or maybe I'm just feeling protective of that little tadpole inside me.  The women must have known how I feeling - I heard a little meow from one of them as I headed away to the elevator. I could've barked back.

I'm trying to be a less judgemental person both to others and to myself. So when the man on the elevator said to me after the women got off, "They're some classy ladies," I replied, "It looks like they're going to have some fun tonight."

I suspect my hate circuit wasn't lighting up like the only block with power in a blackout, but it certaintly also wasn't my proudest moment.

Pregnant teenagers are just like pregnant adults

Now that I'm pregnant, I've suddenly succumbed to all things to do with pregnancy including those supposedly hot button issues such as teenage pregnancy. For all of those really fantastic shows out there (not kidding at all folks), just to name "16 and Pregnant" for one, none of them really digs into the boring reality of it. Sex education or the lack thereof is not an issue with the vast array of material on the web out there - no the real reason women have babies while they're still just babies is economic.

 Women who are poor or also from a visible minority in the states have more reasons to have a baby at 16. Most stay at home and receive help from extended families, and by 21 their child is old enough that they can go to work and will make more money than those women who chose to have a baby young but for many reasons had to wait until their twenties. Often women from the economically disadvantaged will not be fixated on finishing college or university like women from the middle or upper classes, instead they will think of working as soon as possible after high school. And the majority of them do finish high school. For these women, it makes more economic sense to have the stability and joy of a child as soon as possible.

Even if they do wait, it still makes more sense for the economically disadvantaged to have more children. A baby does not cost a lot, if you don't buy all those lovely accessories decorating high income level homes. The more babies you have the more to help around the home and with the younger ones. Just a generation before me in Saskatchewan, farmers had great broods of children who all helped out on the farm. My father was one of those children. For that reason alone, my father didn't particularlly care for eating chickens. As a young boy, it was his job to clean out the kitchen coop. For my struggling grandparents, having children made sense from 18 until 40. Teenagers are just like adults.

Teenage pregnancy - doesn't that become just plain old boring - maybe even rational. God forbid that teenagers could be any of those things. Looking for a reality drama and funding, we perpetuate lies, instead of fixing the problem - growing disparity in wages and the increasing numbers of poverty in the States and also here in Canada. The lies proclaimed on either side of the debate polarize the situation so that the abstinence only program will bring about more pregnancies and STIs or sex education will increase the rate of pregnancies by virtue of putting sex into teenagers' heads.

The name teenage pregnancy is misleading - often teenage girls have babies with men over the age of twenty. Sex is not just a matter between boys and girls, but also between adult men and teenage girls. This is nothing new. Teenage girls have long been attractive for the more established crowd and it is only recently that sex between teenage girls and men has been pushed into the taboo area. Not that sex between teenage girls and men should be necessarily condoned, but it does happen. Teenage pregnancy means really teenage girl pregnancy - why aren't the men involved also being condemned? Isn't easier to blame young people as a group that can't collectively fight back? 

Teenage girls are being targeted because they are young - they are the scapegoats for the insecurities of an older generation, who are afraid of them. These girls are achieving higher levels of education and often outperforming their male counterparts. Increasingly, they are forthright about their sexuality and the associated pleasure. No longer, do these women lie down to be trod on, instead they stand up for themselves and are often as aggressive as men. These teenage girls have at their fingertips a wealth and variety of information about sex and sexuality and are empowered to use it.

 It's not they we should be worried about, it's the people of all ages who live in abject poverty while we wallow in wealth.

For a full account with statistics to back it up, take a look at Teenage Sex and Pregnancy by Mike Males.

Growing a baby and letting the dissertation lie fallow

I'm a fairly private person to begin with, so announcing that I'm in the condition is difficult to say the least. Telling my parents was like declaring that I've had sex and there was a little bit of shame in it. I felt as if I was seventeen and had "forgotten" to use contraception. In reality, at seventeen I was overly careful, worried about wreaking my future greatness and my then current freedom from responsibility

Instead of seventeen, I'm twenty-nine and this was no accident. It was planned. If I would have told my mother at seventeen that I was pregnant, I would have been lambasted by disappointed glares and tears. This time I had to hold my cell away from my ear as my mother squealed in such a high pitch preteen girls usually reserve for the latest flavour. At least I'm receiving the kind of welcome Justin Bieber is probably bored with.

After our parents, we told most people - or at least the nosy ones who just kept pestering us until we admitted it. I still haven't told my phd supervisor yet. Maybe he's already guessed that something's amiss. I've been even less consistent with my work this summer than previously. Well, here's to Monday folks.

Deja Vu Berlin - Die Provinz

I thought I'd ended up in a completely suburban area of town. I saw cookie cutter construction sites, building the perfect small family or rich singletons' homes. There were no cafes, no life, just a friendly fenced-in, official looking building that somehow reminded me of a prison. It turns out I just went in the wrong direction. I think that maps are unnecessary and that I will find the place sooner or later. As long as I sort of remember where to go...

I remembered where to go, but this has just been the latest in a series of incidents where I get people lost. As the navigator, because these macho men refuse to let me drive, idiots, I have to manage where to go. I also unfortunately have a lovely character trait. I get so involved with the conversation, the scenery, that I forget to tell them where to go.

I did find this cafe. It attracted me from Toronto, I liked the name, Die Provinz. But in no way does this place resemble the name. True, the armchairs are old-fashioned and mismatched, but they aren't shabby and the place boasts wireless internet. Brilliant. And it's a block away from my place. From my vantage spot, the food looks good. The beer was good, and the people are hip, but not too much so.

I'm definitely coming back to Die Provinz - perhaps even on Sat nite for the Film club night.

Using the StaBi

It was surprisingly easy to get a library card here in Berlin. I had fears of a unwieldy German burocracy that turned in reality to a lovely front desk service woman, who explained everything with a brilliant smile. Her tomboyish bowl haircut gave her a girlish air about her.

Unfortunately, I don't have an VBB card so I can't actually take things out of the library, but I intend to photocopy willy nilly and work in such a work-inspiring quiet environment.

As per the status of my work, I'm still caught up on Vitalismus - I would like to write a small chapter on its influence on art during the early 1900s, but I'm feeling caught behind a juggling an intersection of many types of texts. I have a feeling it would be best to start pulling threads.

Some tips for the StaBi
- bring some ID
- fill out the form before going to the desk
- don't bring any valuables
- before you go into the section with the "Hand" library, which means you can go into stacks and pick out the books, you have to put all your belongings into a plastic bag.