For the priviledge of belonging to the mandatory owners association, I pay them about sixty euros a month, which I always pay at the end of the month, with all the other bills. The owners association is run by Ymere Beheer, who’ve just sent me a reminder that I haven’t paid my March dues yet, with another fifteen euros in “cost” for sending me this reminder. This is seriously pissing me off. Especially because for some reason best known to themselves, the fsckers are only available to be argued with from 8:30 to 11:00 AM on workdays which is when I, like most people with a job, am at work.
A while back on Unfogged, during yet another discussion about the stupid hoops American health care insurers have their clients jump through, somebody made the brilliant observation that any company big enough is able to send you a bill for some arbitrary amount and there’s little you can about it to fight it that it’s easier just to pay up. Insurers, public utilities and other big necessary evils are particularly able to do this, but I never thought this would happen to me…
If you stay awake late enough, eventually you remember everything. All your usual defenses dissolve. Your mind is weary, and there is nothing in your white, silent room to distract it. Your exhausted brain can no longer apply the pressure needed to repress your memories, and they all come back, all of them, every one, and especially the ones that prove you are the worst version of yourself: the lies, the evasions, the unreturned emails, the shoplifted packs of gum. And, of course, every single ungenerous thing you have ever thought, no matter how fleetingly or how long ago, about the people you love most. Anxiety cascades: just when you’ve drained one disaster from your mind, another breaks the dam. The panic and shame that overcome you when you find a really old to-do list and realize you haven’t done a single item on it? Multiply that feeling by the number of minutes left until sunrise. You can tell yourself to be reasonable, to count your blessings, to get it together, but such reassurances will ring hollow. As Fitzgerald put it, at three o’clock in the morning a forgotten package feels as tragic as a death sentence.
Insomnia is an old friend, a disease that has been with us since the first homonid managed to walk upright, but it’s particularly suited to our current post-modern, post-industrial, networked but atomised lives. You’re never as alone as when your partner is asleep next to you and you’re trying desperately to claw back some few hours of futile rest while the clock ticks endlessly forward and you know the moment that the alarm will go off creeps closer and close, but for now the endless, sleepless night stretches in front of you and all your inner defences have crumpled and you’re there alone, with just the darkest, most despondent parts of your soul to keep you company.
As a child in the eighties it was nightmares of nuclear holocaust, no; the anticipation of nightmares about nuclear holocaust that would keep me awake at night, turning on the brighest light in my room and looking for anything to take my mind of what was waiting in the dark, reading the simplest, most upbeat little kids books I could swipe from my little brothers, hoping that would calm my brains enough to go to sleep, perchance not to dream — sometimes it even worked.
As a teenager, it was Sunday nights and having to go back to school the next morning that would keep me awake, aware of how much I did not want to go and how little homework I had done. That existential anxiety still rules my Sunday nights, even though the best part of being an adult is that you can leave your job behind at four o’clock and not have to think about. The nightmares have become more mundane, anxiety dreams about being in bookstores with huge selections of everything I ever wanted to read but the books slipping through my hands, or costing more than I could pay, endless dreams of trying to catch a train and get ready to go to the station, always against the background of the monstrously swollen geography of my hometown, always dissolving into frustration, five, ten, fifteen times a night.
But worse than that is stumbling into bed late on a weekday and not falling immediately asleep, but lying there tossing and turning, alone or with somebody next to you fast asleep, either having to get up early or knowning you can sleep late the next morning, it doesn’t matter, it’s all awful. A few years back, in 2004, when I had been made redundant in a reorganisation of the company I worked for (long since swallowed up by a larger company and that in turn by a yet larger one), there were weeks and months when I didn’t need to get up in the morning and so could go to bed late, but there was always a point when I was lying in the darkness and Radio 4 would end with Sailing By and the Shipping Forecast and I’d be scolding myself for not going to bed at a reasonable hour. And now sometimes I do go to bed reasonably early, at eleven or twelve to get up the next morning at six and there I’m lying and suddenly I hear that tune again at a quarter to two and I know I won’t have slept enough again and will pay for it…
I’ve spoken to people at the European Central Bank – they are very smart, and very sincerely believe that the best path to long term prosperity is through enforced austerity. They are also – by design – nearly completely insulated from democratic pressure. And despite claiming that they are apolitical, they are in fact playing a profoundly political role, dictating the kinds of domestic institutional reforms that states need to implement if they want to continue getting ECB support.
This means that ECB decision makers are under no very great obligation to think about why they might be wrong, up to the point where complete disaster occurs. And disaster is very likely, if the lessons of the gold standard in pre-World War II Europe tell us anything at all. Enforced austerity does not produce economic growth. What it does produce is political instability.
The people at the ECB may very well be smart — or at least middleclass and polite– but you will never convince them of any facts their paychecks depend on denying. They cannot be reasoned with, they can only be forced to abandon their neoliberal economic orthodoxies and since they cannot be forced through the ballot, it will have to be by the bullet. The radical austerity policies the ECB, IMF, EU and all the other parts of the alphabet soup are enforcing on Europe are pushed through not to benefit the voters, but the banks. Simplistic? Yes, but closer through the truth than what you read in respectable newspapers or hear explained on the news.
Politics and the mainstream media together form a closed system, where only limited deviancy from the orthodoxy is accepted and which has been carefully designed to give the impression of democratic control while making sure to limit any influence ordinary voters might have. Anybody who paid attention could see this in the runup to the War on Iraq: on a single day two million people marched in London alone, millions more across the world but it didn’t stop the war, didn’t even slow it down. It wasn’t an election year and therefore it was easy to ignore the voters: let them march, let them write letter to the editor that won’t be published, let them vent their outrage on Question Time or Any Questions, the smart people know it won’t matter. Give it a month or a year and the smart people can all pretend everybody was in favour of the war; well everybody who counted anyway.
Yeah, sure, Blair had to give up being prime minister a couple of years later, when the smart money was already shifting towards the Tories anyway, but he’s got millions in the banks thanks to cushy jobs given to him by his grateful friends in the private sector and all the respectable newspapers and televion newsshows still take him seriously as peace envoy to the Middle East. Some people might spit on him in the streets, but when was the last time Tony walked anywhere anyway?
Democracy has been made safe for capitalism again; voting won’t change anything important. And if voting doesn’t work, if the ballot is powerless, then the bullet remains…
And then it was exactly a month ago I was facing my first night without Sandra. Here in the Netherlands fortunately the Christmas insanity starts late, as we have to deal with Sinterklaas first, but it has started now. At work the Christmas trees are being put up, the shops have traded in the Sinterklaas tat for Santa tat; worse the X-Mas adverts are back on telly. Awful as they are though, with the incredibly annoying yet very very earwurmable Sky Radio jingle being the worst, none of them can match the horrors of this particular example from the UK, as Charlie Brooks shows:
The rest of the lyrics are worse still. It’s a terribly sad song. So sad Leonard Cohen should be singing it. “Mum” appears to have purchased an entire nervous breakdown’s worth of cold branded goods in a pathetic bid to win the affections of her own family. Her desperate offerings include a top-of-the-range MacBook for Grandad, “an HTC for Uncle Ken”, a “Fuji camera for Jen”, and a “D&G” for Dad. In case you’re wondering what a “D&G” is, the advert makes clear it’s a truly disgusting designer watch even Jordan might balk at. In the mad Littlewoods universe “Dad” seems inexplicably delighted by the sudden appearance of this ghastly bling tumour on his wrist, instead of screaming and trying to kill it with a shoe, like any sensible human would.
Everybody involved with this ad should’ve topped themselves rather than kill their souls this way. Christmas has always been a festival of commercial greed of course, but I’ve not seen it as blatant as this yet. It’s as if the naked lust for more stuff has burst out from behind the veneer of asperation it was made slightly more respectable by.
For Sandra Christmas never was about presents, though she did like the ritual of buying each other slightly more expensive gifts than we could afford, the one time of year we could legitimately spoil ourselves. She loved the rituals of Christmas, the food: mince pies, turkey or another sort of roast, even brussel sprouts, but especially Christmas cake. She made them each year, even in 2009 while we were preparing to go to hospital for the kidney transplant operation she made two, one of which is still on the top shelf of one of the kitchen cupboards. Last year she was in hospital, so I brought Christmas to her, getting all sorts of nice little treats that could be eaten cold or heated up in the ward’s microwave. It wasn’t perfect, but it was Christmas.
This year I’m going back to my family, the first without her and also the first I will be spending entirely with my family since I first met her; it’s like going back to my childhood, not entirely pleasant even had the circumstances been different. It’s hard to explain without sounding ungrateful, but it’s going back from having your family, no matter how small, to being part again of the family; the dynamics of Christmas are altered. It’s only a small complaint in the scheme of things, but I’m still dreading going home a bit, especially with the sentimentality surrounding these holidays.
Never mind, at least I’ll get to enjoy my father’s oliebollen again, which nobody does better…
The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).
The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened.
Soon after he discovered the unauthorized distribution of his music Rietveldt alerted the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra. The composer demanded compensation, but to his frustration he heard very little from Buma/Stemra and he certainly didn’t receive any royalties.
It gets better:
Earlier this year, however, a breakthrough seemed to loom on the horizon when Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits contacted the composer with an interesting proposal. Gerrits offered to help out the composer in his efforts to get paid for his hard work, but the music boss had a few demands of his own.
In order for the deal to work out the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of the Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.
So an anti-piracy group doesn’t ask permission or pay a composer to use his music and the group that should be protecting his rights actually has its boardmembers attempt to extort him…