Freckles & Doubt

Movie club last night, this theme mine, and it finally settled out at "Movies about dance under extreme weather conditions": Singing in the Rain and White Nights. Secondary theme: conceptual whiplash. Also, Really Good Seared Rare Beef Fillet On Rolls, which seems to be establishing itself as another recurring motif in these evenings.

I'd forgotten how much fun Singing in the Rain is; how much of it is slapstick (mostly courtesy of Donald O'Connor, who suffers from an intriguing combination of hyperactivity and a rubber face), and how incredibly, incurably self-aware and ironic the whole thing is - about musicals, about film-making, about acting. It's not so much a musical as a commentary on musicals, which I think accounts for some of the more over-the top elements - the hamming, the goofiness, the extended, excessive musical numbers wedged into the plot at the drop of a hat belonging to the faint shadow of an excuse. It also made me realise that I've been spoiled by Fred Astaire, who is an accomplished dancer to an extent which makes Gene Kelly look rather sloppy. But it was a hugely fun watch, and sent all three of us wandering around thereafter singing "Singing in the Rain" joyously and largely unconsciously. I'm still doing it.

White Nights is an altogether different kettle of fish, assuming they're depressive Russian fish with dancers' muscles and half-assed political pretensions. It's a truly weird movie which I cannot actually say is "good" on any meaningful level, but which has managed to haunt me all day with its images, sequences and oppressive atmosphere. I wanted to re-watch it because the only thing I remember about it from my schooldays (I think I may have seen in the theatre with my mother when it came out, which was, whoa, 1985) was that incredible, blissful, unbelievable sequence with Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov doing a sort of modern dance/ballet/tap fusion in perfect step despite completely different body styles, in an empty practice hall, for no other reason than the hell of it. To me this is what dance is about - mutuality, synchronisation, the sheer pleasure of moving in harmony. It's the stylised and publicly acceptable embodiment of good sex. This film is scripted in giant, half-formed clichés; it has "Russian Communism Bad!" written all over it in letters of fire; its actually very good cast struggles against chronically poor pacing and the uneasy mixing of dramatic tropes with those of a spy thriller and a dance movie - but its dance sequences are pure joy. Neither Hines nor Baryshnikov are any good at all as actors when you give them actual words to say, but they communicate incredibly powerfully when all they have to do is move. Also, bonus points for the most deliriously decontextualised performance of Porgy and Bess I have ever seen.

I think White Nights may have weirded jo&stv out far more than the classic musical I was afraid they'd hate, but I'm very glad I saw both films again. Now I'm going to go home and load up that dance sequence, just because I can. In fact, here it is now. I love the discipline here, the mutuality, despite the fact that the body language is poles apart - Hines all loose-limbed and floppy, Baryshnikov perfectly controlled, but with the unbelievably evocative power which only a top-flight, classically trained dancer can impart to steps which are, technically speaking, slumming it.



And then I'm going to watch my entire Fred Astaire collection. While regretting, with every fibre of my being, that I stopped taking ballroom dance classes, because people flying with their feet on the ground is beautiful to watch, but it's better if you can do it yourself.

It's not surprising that I hate going to the dentist, everyone hates going to the dentist. Having someone else poke around inside your mouth is an uncomfortably intimate sort of thing even without the pain and the grinding noises and the horrible little supersonic whines of the drills. But I really hate going to the oral hygienist, in whose chair I've just spent an ungodly half an hour. I'm very rigorous about brushing my teeth, but her exertions make me feel as though I've been caught out living in a filthy house with an unmade bed. And she always guilt trips me about flossing.

Flossing is the curse of modern Western civilisation. Who really flosses, anyway? It's the perfect millstone around our neck, compounded of a horrible constellation of impulses - health, beauty, self-discipline, inconvenience, guilt, pain, boredom. I'm very bad at remembering to do it because to me it feels as though it's about beauty: it suggests that I should be aspiring to shiny white toothpaste-advertisement teeth, and I mentally classify it under the same heading as wearing make-up or blow-drying my hair. These activities nark me off not just because they're about superficial ideas of beauty, but because they demand that I take time pandering to them. Life's too short to spend half an hour every morning blow-drying, making yourself up, and flossing.

Of course, this is utterly wrong. Flossing isn't just about shiny white Tom Cruise teeth, it's about preventing plaque build-up and therefore about reduced fillings and healthier teeth, insert dental infomercial here, and less time in the dentist's chair in the long run. I'm perfectly aware of this, and therefore my time with the oral hygienist is nicely balanced between resentment, pain, guilt and self-loathing, with a side order of Herodotus's crocodile (little tooth-cleaning bird in my mouth! crunch!) and my heels lifting several inches off the chair in sheer muscular tension. She's right. I should floss. But I probably won't.

Last Night I Dreamed I threw over this admin job and emigrated to Nicaragua, where an unspecified nice man had promised me and a bunch of other people new jobs, which turned out to be in (surprise!) university admin. At some stage I was sleeping in a sleeping bag out on a hillside somewhere, and woke up with the dawn to find myself surrounded by the beautiful, half-tamed jaguars which belonged to the resistance movement.

Bother. If I hadn't used that particular DR & Quinch quote for the subject line of my last post, I could have used it for this one. Oh, well. As it turns out, DR & Quinch have a quote for everything.

You may have seen that BoingBoing link to the shooting gallery photographs: one Dutch woman has gone to a shooting gallery almost every year since 1936, and shot at a target which automatically takes a photograph of her. In these sequenced photos, united by the repeating image of her stance with the fairground rifle, you have her life from a teenager to a determined 88-year-old who still goes and takes her shot, year after year. On one level it's the most amazing catalogue of history: pre-war, the significant gap in photographs 1939-45, then post-war, through the fifties and sixties and seventies, with all the concomitant changes. The interesting thing is how the people around her change: all the kids' fashions in their 70s and 80s glory, and the shooting gallery surrounds gradually filling up with cheap plastic mass-produced junk. She doesn't change, much. She gets older, but apparently your style is fairly set by your younger days. Particularly, I suspect, if you're strong-minded enough to stick to this kind of tradition in the teeth of all odds.

On another level the sequence is fascinating because of its documentation of technology: early black-and-white photographs, gradually morphing into cheap, over-exposed colour, and then better colour, and around her people are caught more and more often raising cameras of their own. In the last decade onlookers have video cameras, suggesting not only the ubiquity of the technology, but, by inference, the development of media interconnectedness - after all these years the ritual has become notable enough that she has a fan club, her annual gesture has become the stuff of contemporary media sound-bytes.

On yet another level, I am floored by this on in fairly emotional terms - partly, I think, because her clothing and body-shape and general air of cussed determination remind me of my own grandmothers, who were both ladies of personality perfectly capable of sticking to their guns, if you'll forgive the awful pun, to this degree. But above all, this is a testament to continuity, to the possibility of return and permanence which reminds us how increasingly such an annual return becomes impossible in the bulk of modern lives, particularly ours in Africa. I could not have gone to the same place every year since I was sixteen to record a photograph. I'm unusual in that I could actually have gone to the same place since I was about nineteen, since I've been in Cape Town all that time, but it would have to be a fairly immoveable landmark. I can't think of any sideshow attraction which would have endured that long, through all the political and economic and cultural changes we have undergone. A lot of my friends and family couldn't have done it, either, they've been all over the world at one time or another. We are far more rootless these days, drifting between towns and continents at the drop of a hat; it's not only that one small fairground sideshow is unlikely to keep going, it's that we're unlikely to be there to patronise it.

So the whole thing segues quite neatly into the other BoingBoing link this morning, which was to Douglas Coupland's radical pessimist's guide to the next ten years: the two articles are fascinating read in conjunction. Our present already feels as though it shifts and changes faster than we can catch up with; the future, he says, is going to feel even faster than it does now. On some level this is exciting, but at the same time there's a sense of nostalgic regret for the kind of life where a woman can raise a toy rifle and take a picture in the same place as an annual tradition for over seventy years. Perhaps I'd find it dull, but there's a part of me which envies her her life, and her times.

Quite apart from my unrepentant love of cheesy fantasy B-movies, there are really only three reasons for me to trundle off and watch The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which I did this morning in the slightly hysterical company of jo&stv and the Evil Landlord. They are:

1. Early imprinting on Dungeons and Dragons, which means I'll pretty much watch anything with wizard battles in it, as long as it isn't an asinine adaptation of a beloved text (hence no Last Airbender or Dark is Rising for me);
   
2. Extremely low expectations of the film giving rise to high expectations of frequent opportunities for righteous mockery;
   
3. A certain curiosity as to the probable performance levels of Nic Cage's Hair.

Nic Cage's Hair in the event offered an uncharacteristically subdued performance in this film, suggesting that its scenery-chewing career is under revision, possibly in search of slightly more Oscar-baiting roles¹. It also didn't help to have it partially extinguished under That Horrible Hat for large portions of the film, and the Hair is almost certainly speaking sternly to its agent on that front:



However, in categories (1) and (2) the movie certainly delivered: while the cheesy wizard battles were flashy and entertaining, as befitting any film bearing Jerry Bruckheimer's name, the movie was most fun in its cheerful participation in the inevitable mockery. The really quite horrible and clunky dialogue, along with the absolute predictability of the plot, was resurrected at any moment when it might become unbearably wince-worthy by deliberate undercutting, ironic tongue-in-cheekness, and happy geeky undermining of heroic stereotypes. (And what's with that? geeks are so the underdog cliché of the moment. Bring me Scott Pilgrim, stat, it's time it was done intelligently.)

The cast are serviceable rather than inspired, and while Nic Cage is really turning into a truly terrible actor incapable of giving any degree of realism to his lines, there were some small portions of scenery left mostly ungnawed. It's okay: Alfred Molina and the Hair got to most of them later. The best performance was from the special effects, and bonus points for dragons and mirrors and Tesla coils, oh my, as well as a rather creepy disembodied Morgan Le Fay. Also, this being a Bruckheimer, car chases, foot chases, paper chases, Chinese New Year dragon chases, fire, floods, giant flapping gargoyle thingies, rather sexy animated bull statues (not a spoiler, you completely see that coming the moment you see the statue), and the shorting out of the complete New York metropolitan area in the service of saving the world. Extra bonus points for wolf puppies, the Depeche Mode crack, and for tuning your Tesla coils to the girl's musical preferences as a dating strategy. Geeks rule.

We had a blast. I can't recommend that you go and see this movie, because the trick to enjoying it is to go in knowing full well it'll be absolutely terrible. This is not a recommendation. But it's an unpretentiously terrible film: you need to relax and let it do its schtick, something that's fast becoming a skill necessary to surviving Hollywood blockbuster dreck. It worked for Prince of Persia too. Next week we're watching The A-Team. News at 11.

---

¹ The in-car conversation on the way to the movie entailed an increasingly wild set of speculations on the complex private life of Nic Cage's Hair: its dedicated personal assistant, its demands for star billing separately from Nic Cage, its tendency to leave hair on the furniture and piddle on the rug, its battles with the mullet typecasting, leading to an addiction to seedy night-life, the bottle and cheap women, with concomitant drunken ravings when Nic and its agent arrive yet again to drag it home from a booze dive at 3am. Get stv to do the drunken ravings for you sometime. Also, I shall never forgive Jo for her image of Nic Cage's Hair going down on a floozy. Must bleach brain now, repeatedly. So must you. And it won't be enough.

Spam is the new coat lint: the irritating kipple clinging to your garments, that you spot, classify and brush away without thinking about it. It's become background noise to e-mail, so routine that I don't even think about the analysis I do, reflexively, on each message as it pops into my inbox. It's been months since I've had to do a search to double-check for scam warnings with any of the reputable sites, because mostly I reject them, as most of you probably do, either on the subject line or halfway through the first sentence. This auto-destruct is based primarily on their grammar and expression and only secondarily on their actual content and positioning. The scams may change, but the level of illiteracy remains somewhere around your ankles, in the mud.

I haven't yet had to endure spam on my phone, bar the occasionally quickly-deleted marketing screed from some company where I actually have an account of some sort, until this morning, when an SMS message cheerily announced that I'd won something! The re-contextualisation is the sneaky part, with the small but real possiblity that I won't transfer the paranoid skillset from email to the new medium; hell, if Cory Doctorow can be caught out, balloon, cape and goggles notwithstanding, I certainly can. It's the more likely because legitimate cellphone companies actually do run promotions of various sorts; the chance that you'd score money via a text message is small, but it's greater by several magnitudes than the likelihood that you'd win via email.

This one didn't even touch sides: my laser-pointed search-and-destroy grammar-analysis reflex kicked it out with the first word. Different medium, same sad, illiterate phishers.

Congratulations!! Your no. Was among the lucky winners on the NOKIA 2010 YEARLY PROMO. You won, R150,000. Ref no. 0155P. Call +27719451302. For Your Cash Prize.

Fail on the following counts:

1. "Congratulations" as the opening word. This is sheer marketing, designed to trigger wish-fulfilment, and hence to pull you in and make you read from the first word. A genuine win notification letter doesn't need to honeytrap you, it'll probably congratulate you but there's likely to be a lot more legalese involved and a far less frantically effusive tone.
   
2. Multiple exclamation points. Sure sign, as Terry Pratchett sagely observes, of a diseased mind, quite apart from the informal register.
   
3. "Number" abbreviated as "no." If this were a legitimate promotion win notification - well, it probably wouldn't be by SMS, but if it were it would be by bulk SMS from a computer, not typed on a phone with predictive text, and if it were from Nokia they wouldn't be worried about length and cost. Also, a formal notification would require a more formal register and legalese. This is a habitual informal phone-user scammer slipping into familiar habits without thinking about how they position the typer.
   
4. Capitalisation of "Was" after the abbreviation full stop. Auto-function on most phone text editors, here simply not corrected. Hurry/lack of concern for grammar do not say "official communication."
   
5. Capitalisation of NOKIA 2010 YEARLY PROMO. Self-important, attempting to be catchy, too Nigerian for words.
   
6. Random, incorrect comma after "won". Sheer illiteracy. Corporal Carrot Commas are only cute in Corporal Carrot.
   
7. The win amount: R150 000 is simply too large to be realistic for any competition via cellphone. Mostly the legit ones seem to be small sums, airtime, etc. Again, this is trying to elicit greed and thus prompt the revelation of personal details and account numbers which is presumably the point of this. The phrase "Cash prize" towards the end of the message has the same purpose - "cash" is a trigger word.
   
8. Minor props on the reference number, it's the only bit that so far sounds halfway authentic, although in a competition of any size it would probably have to be longer and more complex.
   
9. Random full stop in the middle of a sentence, before "For your cash prize." Actually, this says non-native English speaker to me, it's not a classic first-language error.
   
10. The scam is detailed, with much of the above content, on the MTN page, which means it's not only lame, it's old and busted.

Whatever happened to the classic cons and stings of yesteryear? the ones that entailed actually studying your victim, learning the idiom, working to construct a tone and approach that provide a reasonable facsimile of the real thing? The truth, of course, is that I'm not the market for this. The market for this is three fold: (1) people who are not familiar with internet culture and memes and who mistake the text medium for authority; (2) people who are really desperately poor and are grasping at straws; and (c) people who are as illiterate as the scammers.

God, it's June, how did that happen? Lost, half a year, left lying around somewhere, owner distressed by absence of anything to show for it.


My recent scanner acquisition means it's now possible to scan various weird bits and bobs I've been meaning to inflict on my readership for a while. This one is a leaflet thingy that ended up in my postbox, and I've kept it because it's such a beautiful example of complete, obsessive, off-the-wall fruitloopishness. It merits a scan just to document the particular weirdnesses of the writer's more obscure religious tenets, which apparently hold actual layout, differentiated headings and paragraph breaks to be the work of the Divvil. The obsessive attempt to pack in information (no paragraph breaks, tiny font, headings indicated only by capitals or underlining) is actually weirder than the content, which is pretty good going because the content is weird.

The first page is some kind of oddball attempt to construct a tongue-in-cheek alien-eye view of humanity, in the form of an "ALIEN SPACE DOCUMENT" from "the Commander of the prison planet Alcatrash", which reports on the strange and erroneous beliefs of humanity (evolution, primarily), sprinkled with random unpunctuated Bible references and a sort of chorus refrain of "Makes you think, doesn't it?" This segues into extremely bad doggerel poetry, and then an alien newsflash calling off their invasion at the alarming discovery that the Earth has already been invaded by the Prince of Darkness, whose disembodied demons are the size of mosquitoes and "seek to possess every person on earth", 6 000 to a person. The last two pages are an increasingly incoherent rant about modern society and the manifest ways in which it's entirely given over to Lucifer; the writer inserts occasional Bible references randomly into the flow without integrating them into the sentence, which feels bizarrely like some kind of broken footnote system.

My subject line comes from the insert to the flyer, at half size, offering you a lot of extremely literal readings of Biblical verses under the headings "What the Bible says about ants" (apparently it's terribly significant that they're female), "What the Bible says about Tight Reverends", "What the Bible says about Global Warming" (it's caused by too much blasphemy), and a final rant on how you can't prove the existence of God and shouldn't try.

The whole thing reads like a particularly low-intellect fundamentalist bigot on Tik: intensity, energy, a desperate sense of importance, and a sort of cockroach-skittering failure of focus which makes me imagine the poor writer frothing at the mouth impatiently as s/he tries to cram ABSOLUTELY ALL the VITALLY IMPORTANT RANTINGS! into a very small space. Hence, I suppose, the lack of paragraphing. White space could be filled with divinely-inspired wisdom, and is therefore an Abomination Unto Nuggan if it remains empty.

I find it profoundly scary not only that there are people out there who actually think like that, but that they are so convinced of the burning relevance of their ideas that they have to disseminate them, however amateurishly, through the medium of print. I can't read something like this without involuntarily occupying, even momentarily, the headspace of the writer, and it's a scary, overcrowded, nightmarishly unreal place.

So, a friend is going through the "OMG do I really want to have kids?" thing, and it's making me think about the issues in a state of profound political annoyance. Because the truth is, there is enormous cultural pressure from a large number of sources which is exerted on women to make them think that child-bearing is not only desirable, but inevitable. It's just what women do, because (1) hey wow, human race, continuation, yadda yadda, and (2) besides, it's absolutely the ONLY experience which will ever complete you as a female person, and further besides, (3) it's selfish not to. I wholly and utterly support any friend of mine who feels the need to have children, it's a great thing and I rather enjoy the resulting small thundering herds. I am equally and entirely outraged that any friend of mine, of my generation, born and raised under Western culture, should feel that she has no actual choice in procreating. I also absolutely reject all of the above reasons for doing it.

So, my own personal and philosophical proclivities deal quite neatly with (1). The human race needs fewer babies, not more, we live on a horribly overpopulated planet which is on the brink of ecological disaster, and apart from the need to cut the population, I'm not entirely convinced there's going to be a world worth living in for any offspring of mine. And I really don't buy the traditional response to same, which is "oh, but you're an intelligent educated woman, the world needs more of that kind of person, it's your duty to procreate" - it's a horribly self-congratulatory argument, don't you think? The world at large, particularly the madly-procreating bits of it, needs more education, not more self-righteous Westerners. I do my bit for that every year when I make another cohort of students read Sheri Tepper.

On (2) I'm particularly aware of the whole thing because my dad's just died, and it was one of his hobby-horses. He was an animal scientist and horribly prone to biological essentialism: as far as he was concerned, my body and hormones and what have you would never allow me to be happy without bearing children, and I don't think I convinced him otherwise before he died. We used to get into quite enthusiastic feminist debates about it, in which I'd be all outraged that he was mentally classifying me with his bloody cattle. Because, really, Papa, you don't have a uterus, you know? and here I am telling you that I'm actually perfectly happy without all the childbearing schtick, and am not feeling a lack, and why the hell should your sense of my identity be more correct than mine? Also, men are equally genetically programmed to hunt and fight and all the rest, and they quite happily sublimate it into capitalism, sports and political arguments, so why shouldn't the parallel work for women? Such maternal urges as I have (and I do have them) are apparently contented with a weird combination of teaching, student advising, cats, cooking huge meals for friends, and abstractedly patting on the head any offspring-of-friends who happen to rocket through my ambit.

See, I'm perfectly prepared to accept that motherhood is an amazing experience, a life-changing one, a particular aspect of being human that you can't access any other way. I know a large number of very happy, fulfilled mothers (starting with my own), and I love watching them celebrate that experience. There's a part of me that's a bit wistfully sad that I'll never have that, but I also don't believe it's the only way to be happy, or fulfilled, or to have a meaningful life. So in answer to (3) I have to ask: how many famous women activists, writers, scientists would not have achieved what they did if they were also raising a family? Is their choice somehow selfish or incomplete? Should we by this logic be faintly despising Jane Austen?

But, you know, it hit me yesterday: really the bitch about this whole cultural expectation of parenthood is its gender-exclusivity. "Of course you'll have kids" is ultimately a thing that the male half of creation does to the female, or conditions the female to do to other females: it's another way of controlling and defining female sexuality. There's a far lesser tendency to look pityingly at men who've chosen not to become fathers. And that's a purely Victorian survival, a result of the nineteenth century's ridiculous need to idealise Womanhood as either Virginal or Maternal: a complete refusal, in other words, to think of women in any terms other than those defined by their sexuality. Somewhere deep in the antediluvian slime of that belief system, women who have sex but not children are not Mothers, but Whores. It sucks. We should be more enlightened than that.

But the sad truth is that we're not, that those attitudes are embedded firmly in our technically post-feminist culture; a woman choosing to have kids, or not, is bombarded on all sides, from family, friends, the media, literature, with a horrible and heavy weight of expectation which says she ought to. This means that if she's like me and doesn't have the maternal urge to any imperative extent, she's faced with the choice of having children and vaguely resenting it, or not having children and being vaguely resented. This is why, I've realised, I have a minor and sneaking sympathy with even the particularly ugly and frothing extremism of some of the online childfree movements: they're extreme because they have to be, because you need some pretty serious momentum to break free of all the weight of expectation. If your society is a bit insane in this area, there's a reasonable chance you'll become a nut in sheer self-defense.

A lot of my own personal ability to basically pull a sign at societal expectation and defiantly be happy in the teeth of it is purely circumstantial: I'm not in a relationship, I don't have a broody would-be-father looking expectantly at me, and my biological clock is apparently digital. Even if all of the above weren't true, my slightly despairing sense of our horribly crowded world would probably still weigh in quite significantly. I'm lucky to be reasonably clear-cut. I truly and deeply sympathise with anyone who isn't, and is trying to negotiate a space for themselves while being tugged in all directions.

I don't go out to Kalk Bay often enough. Admittedly it's a bit torridly prone to roadworks at the moment, but it's a lovely drive that on Friday evening was through a beautiful dusk, with that sort of luminous quality of bronze light on a silver-gray sea. The occasion was dinner and theatre at the Kalk Bay Theatre, which is currently putting on a production called Rump Steak, which jo&stv saw and loved in Grahamstown. This is a witty, fantastic, hilarious one-man drama which should be seen, without question, by all cooks, fans of high-class dining, lovers of physical theatre, people of any imagination whatsoever, and anyone who hasn't actually had their sense of humour surgically removed.

As an added bonus, the Kalk Bay Theatre is a completely wonderful space, both in vibe and in the actual theatre situation. It's in a converted church; the theatre itself is tiny, seating perhaps 40 people, and the restaurant is above it in a sort of gallery which looks down onto the stage. You wander in and confirm your booking, which you haven't paid for, and the nice lady behind the desk gives you slips of paper which you then put on your choice of seat. Then you go upstairs and are fed good food by cheerful staff while the ticket price and your after-show coffee all go on the bill. Good wine, not too expensive. Interesting food. Generous portion sizes, which is just as well because this isn't a show you want to see on an empty stomach.

Rump Steak is a one-man show which lasts only about an hour, and probably flattens the actor nightly even so. He's a cheerful, likeable Frenchy dude called Gaëtan Schmid, who it transpires is actually Belgian; he has manic energy, enormously quick and witty reactions and an extremely communicative physical presence. He's dressed like a French chef, he stands on a little tiled platform about a metre square, and he uses no props at all. He and a soundtrack between them construct the kitchen at an upscale French restaurant, its seven staff members, and at least three from front-of-house. He doesn't have dialogue, strictly: while he speaks almost continuously, it's almost entirely the rapid-fire names of French dishes, used marvellously evocatively as the hinge-pin indicators of event. (The soundtrack is by James Webb, of Thelema and mad pagan days - James, if you still read this blog occasionally, bloody marvellous job).

Between the incredibly evocative sound effects (chopping, frying, grating, mixing, tossing lobsters into boiling water, a possessed cocktail shaker), intensely clever use of music, a few minor lighting cues and the exertions of the actor, the characters, space and events are embodied for you, tangible and endearing, in thin air. With the precision of the actor's movements in synch with the sound-track, I swear there were moments when I could momentarily see the utensils and food. (Jo went one better: she says the first time she saw the production, she wandered out at the end vaguely thinking "Why is the guy so exhausted and sweating, there are several people in that kitchen doing all the work?" I did something similar when I found myself thinking, hmmm, the actor who plays the pâtissier isn't quite as good, it's a slightly one-dimensional role...) This transcends mime. It's a precise, clever, absorbing piece of fantastic creation which yanks the audience's imagination out, possibly via the nose with foreceps, and puts it mercilessly to work.

It's all the more appealing, particularly to someone of my known proclivities, because the production builds on that intrinsic act of imaginative participation by running with it, not just into the realistic creation of a kitchen scene, but into far freer fantastic space. The chef de cuisine, pâtissier, sauciere, slinky French waitress ("Jacqueline!") and the rest are beautifully-delineated, instantly recognisable individuals, and the mad rush of the orders and client demands are likewise real and concrete (and, I have to say, it's beautifully paced). But so are the odd fantastic bits: the grill chef's misanthropic character, giant butcher knife and dodgy relationship with the live cow he apparently keeps in the freezer; or whatever the hell it is that infests the cocktail shaker, bounces around splashing, shouts tiny, incomprehensible French abuse, and finally drives off in a car. (The actor came and chatted to us for ten minutes while we were having coffee: he says he personally thinks it's a Smurf in the cocktail shaker, but the audience is invited to make up their own minds). Above all I loved this: if you're going to embody imaginative space, why stop at actual reality? damned straight.

If you're in Cape Town, go and see this show - it's on for another week or so. No, honestly, do. Don't take my word for it: there's a preview here. And give my love to the Smurf.

Back at work, alas. On the upside, it's pretty dead, and I'm mostly cruising the internet and answering email backlogs in a desultory fashion. I can't work out if it's an upside or a downside that the Japanese Peace Lily in my office has produced two flowers while I was away: it seems a bit of a pointed commentary on my ineffectual druiding ("look! I do better without you!").

Making Light pointed me to today's happy dose of religious bigotry, now with bonus illogic and out-of-context references to Catullus. Apparently all men are actually latently gay and permitting gay marriage will only encourage them. Mostly this speaks volumes about the latent gay urges of the writer, don't you think? Homosexuality is never such a bugaboo as when you're trying to deny it in yourself. (He's righteously and rather entertainingly hacked to shreds in the comments, I'm pleased to say).

It's making me ponder, though, and alerting the Department of Logical Extrapolation. We're in South Africa, home of a liberal constitution I'm rather proud to live under, which explicitly states that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is not permitted. By this logic, surely it's not OK for a religious figure to stand up in a South African pulpit and denounce homosexuality as wrong? by doing this, don't they "discriminate directly or indirectly" against homosexuals, most importantly by teaching and encouraging discrimination?

And if this is the case, surely it's theoretically possible to take them to court? As far as I know the Bill of Rights's provisions on discrimination are only actually translated into law in the case of employment equity and right to marriage, but the Constitution is supposed to be binding on the courts. Point 8.3 of the Bill of Rights states that "When applying a provision of the Bill of Rights to a natural or juristic person in terms of subsection (2), a court ­... in order to give effect to a right in the Bill, must apply, or if necessary develop, the common law to the extent that legislation does not give effect to that right". If someone tried to sue a church for frothing anti-gay sentiment, the court would be obliged to create a precedent based on the constitution in order to deem whether this was a crime.

So I'm interested in why this hasn't happened yet. Am I misreading the constitutional notion of "discrimination", so that saying that gays are evil isn't actually discrimination? because, ye gods, it really is. Or does no-one call them on it because of the usual failure of political will in the face of large-scale and dearly-held beliefs? I cannot sufficiently state how happy it would make me to have every narrow-minded fundamentalist church in this country slapped with the requirement to shut the fuck up with regard to their personal bigotries about homosexuality, because "it's my religion!" cannot trump "it's illegal". But that's going to happen like an academic post in science fiction is going to fall into my lap tomorrow. More's the pity.

Yup, that was Odegra, that was. In addition to the frankly torrid traffic patterns over the last few days, the sigil-writing bugger has also ensured that tracing the dread sigil over Cape Town's roads has caused my car to run suddenly and catastrophically out of oil. I put in a pint a week ago; driving out to have dinner in Muizenberg with The Nicest Ex-Supervisor In The World last night, I experienced a sudden rude buzzing noise and an oil light, and poking the engine with sticks revealed about 2mm of a sort of sludge at the bottom of the sump. Presumably the full load of oil has been distributed in a long, dribbling slick to reinforce the sigil, which the Sigil-Writing Bugger probably set fire to in the small hours of the morning, cackling horribly. Next effect: Table Mountain slides inexorably into the sea. News at 11.

Fortunately putting four pints of oil into the car did, in fact, fill her up enough to allow me to limp home, grumbling, whereupon my Evil Landlord, nice man, lent me his car and I ended up in Muizenberg only an hour late, driving much too fast as I do in his car, which has a far bigger engine and music on tap. The Nicest Ex-Supervisor In The World has the highly civilised opinion that a good dinner date with an ex-student entails champagne, home-made jambalaya and a watching of The Devil Wears Prada, with a minimal amount of actual film or cultural analysis and a maximal quotient of Meryl Streep fangirling. (Thoroughly enjoyed the film, although I found myself watching the clothes/make-up application scenes, and the truly horrible high-heeled shoes, with a sort of detached anthropological fascination. Counting on my fingers, I don't think I've worn make-up for in excess of about seven years now, and I feel fine. Meryl Streep, on the other hand, is fabulous and can wear make-up any time she likes.)

This weekend I absolutely have to sort out my reader for the internet eroticism lectures I'm giving the week after next. They're only about a month overdue, after all. I go to embrace the eight-book-thick pile of tomes on blogging which awaits me, doom-like, next to the sofa. Before that, however, because it's funny: Alien Vs. Predator.