Shortcuts

I was in the tube the other day with my beloved 18-year-old brother sitting next to me. I was reading a novel by Maupassant, and to be honest I was so much in it I couldn't even hear the roaring of the train.

The book was about a 19th century painter madly in love with a female socialite, Anne de Guilleroy. The guy was supposed to do her portrait, but after a few meetings, he begins to develop strong feelings towards her. So he tries to figure out how to turn the model into his mistress. Being a brillant talker, he skilfully injects in his conversation subtle innuendos and daring proposals.
She lets him talk the talk, waiting for the moment when he would walk the walk. But his first attempt to kiss her is somehow heavy-handed and after offering her lips in a moment of abandon, Anne de Guilleroy swiftly falls back to safer ground. She rejects him and leaves the room.

The poor fellow is at sea. He thinks about ways to redeem himself, but in the same time he doesn't want to give in. She goes back to his house the next day as if nothing happened and asks him to finish her portrait. But there is too much affectation in her apparent indifference for it to be true, and the painter feels that the battle is not completely lost. He affects indifference as well, and obediently limits his conversation to painting and art.
He's a better act than she is, and Anne de Guilleroy starts wondering whether the passion is gone. She's longing for his sweet talk again. Maybe she has feelings as well, and maybe she wants him to possess her. But being a society woman, she can't allow herself to show away too much. She must delay the surrender to add value to its price.
And so began the second act of an intricated foreplay whose ebb and flow promised to be as staggering as the atlantic tide...

I was about to learn about the long-expected outcome when my beloved brother interrupted my reading to show me a SMS he had just received from a girl called Charlotte, who he had been chatting with on the internet for two days:

"Hello, it's Charlotte. If you want, we can have sex tonight. My parents are away. Bring condoms if you have some, otherwise I think I have one or two left. See you. Love"

I threw away my book and we got off the train.

Family blog

"Hello, my name is Wendy and I am three-months old. I'm gaining weight very fast. Yesterday I went to the doctor's office with my dad to have them check a diaper rash that was making me very upset. I feel better now.
I spend 98% of my time in my baby's bed and sometimes I'm a bit bored. So I cry and my mummy comes and holds me. I don't like when she tickles me though, I can't stand tickeling. It makes me dribble. Sometimes I think my mummy is a little bit stupid. She smiles all the time even when there is nothing funny.

My daddy has a digital camera. He loves to take pictures of me. Hundreds of them. And then he posts the pictures on the web and asks people to leave comments. This is so nice. Many people will know me now. It's a shame I can't reply to the comments myself.
Yesterday I defecated in my nappy. It really smelled like shit, but my mummy changed my nappy and put the dirty one in a bin. I wish my daddy had taken a photo of my shit and posted it on the web, so everybody could have seen it.

It's not just about me in the family. We also have a dog and a hamster. My dog's name is Timmy and my hamster's name is Pimmy. Sometimes it's confusing people because they want to call Timmy but they say "Pimmy" instead. But it doesn't make any real difference because hamsters don't answer to their name.
My daddy has made a video of me and Timmy. He posted it in our family blog too. It says: "Hello guys! This is Wendy and our hamster Timmy, they're having a great time together!"

I also have a big brother, Justin. My daddy took him to the Kindergarden for the first time the other day. This is very interesting to know and so he added a special entry on the family blog. It says: " Andrew loves school! He is so good at it, too! At our first parent teacher conference, we learned just how good Andrew is at school! He was almost perfect on all his testing, he knows almost every word he needs to know for the year right now! He also loves Spanish! The teacher is recommending additional math at home so he can be challenged! I'm so proud of my bright boy!"

I'm not so proud of my family, so if someone hears this call, please report them to the police. Otherwise I'll find a way to kill myself. It's the only way to make them stop adding pictures on the net. But even then I'm not sure. Poor, poor, poor me..."

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

All right, folks. This blog won't become a movie review website overnight. But when it comes to Woody Allen, I am ready to make an exception.

Once every three films, the guy comes up with a jewel. He already made gold (Annie Hall), silver (Manathan) and emerald (Match Point), but this one film I will put in the category: "purple silk". You'll tell me that we don't know of any jewel made out of purple silk, but that's not the point.

The way I see it, the genius of the guy is that he keeps making the same movie decade after decade and always finds a new spotlight to illuminate the script. And the script, here again, is about love and relationships.

A girl ready to fall in love (Cristina) but who never quite achieves it; another girl (Vicky) decided not to fall in love but who cannot help it when circumstances give a hand; a Spanish Casanova who seeks more than a one-night stand and less than a lifetime relation, which he yet seems to be bound to due to a passionate fellow-artist (Penelope Cruz) with whom he maintains a post-divorce love/hate relationship.
And just to make sure every generation in the audience has a chance to fall under the spell of this subtle yet dangerous session of love psychoanalysis, a woman rolling to her sixties also questions her marriage and shows signs of splitting from the all fucking program.

For no relationship here can be called rock-solid. The initial love triangle develops into more triangles, each of these triangles containing a meaning, a possibility of love never finding its balance. "True love" exists in synchrony, but not in diachrony. Each day that passes brings a new ingredient to the cooking process and in the end everybody wonders if it's not too soon to lay the table.

Love and advert

"I wanna be adored", sang Ian Brown of the Stone Roses. Well I don't. Not anymore. For as Oscar Wilde said: I was adored once (or twice), and it didn't lead to anything good.

It's all a matter of advertising. You put an ad for yourself and one girl bites the hook. At first you feel grateful to her, she's your first customer. "Your ad was nice" she says, "I now want to know more". So you show her to your room, "here's a picture of me when I was 8", you say, beginning to undress her with one finger standing on the verge of erection. Then you show her to your friends, introducing her as Vickie, Lise, Helen or whatever her name may be. "Your friends are nice", she says, "and so are you."

Then you flirt for a while, voluntarily limiting your meetings to twice or three times a week, cooking your burgeoning love over a gentle heat. "This girl is sweet", you think. I know her but I don't own her, I screw her but she's not my girlfriend, I take pleasure but I take no order. I could hurt her feelings but i don't want to, she could hurt mine and that keeps me sharp.

Months after that you have a nickname and she has one. She forgot your ad and looks at the product straight in the eyes. She's part of the company now, she has her say. There are things she likes, and some she doesn't. Marketing isn't part of the show anylonger.
You devoted yourself to your one customer, and considering the price you paid for the ad - years of maturing, building your personnality, moulding your sex-appeal, piano skills and cultural references - you start to feel angry with that.

Some girl takes interest with you in a trendy bar of the riverside, the one you have skipped away from ages ago, and your best friend comes to interrupt: "Sorry, love, he's not available. But I am." You go home brooding on your pride, fighting against your own nature and trying to forget. "Am I an asshole?, you ask yourself, or just the typical urban greedy piece of a man whose ego and hunger for more won't leave in peace until he gets poor and old and doesn't have a choice?"

You're back home and you watch TV. Not too loud for she's asleep. Scarlet Johansson gives an interview and says she broke up with her boyfriend and found another one. "He's the one, she says. I feel it in my heart". You think "I want to be him", but then again you think twice. "Maybe I don't want to be him. I want to be him and the guy after him, or maybe him and the guy before him". But you're neither. You're in your flat and she's sleeping. On TV there's an ad about a meeting website.

Time for you to put another one.