25 hour party people

Some of the 150 Belgians who sang Happy Birthday to Timber last year.
Photo by Tom Tollenaere.

Apparently this is Timberblog's 50th entry. And apparently I'm 24 tomorrow. I think it is going to be a Very Bad Birthday, as I am working all evening, and will probably be lucky enough to have some downtrodden single tourist come to reception and spill out their entire life story on me. Again. Still, it was never going to be as good as last year, when the clocks went backward on the 31st, ensuring that I had a whole extra hour of people buying me pints. This was after playing a gig where the host informed everyone it was my birthday, before instructing me to lead the singing on the piano. Happy Birthday to Me, I thought, as 150 Belgians sang along. For those of you with nothing to do next week, you could do worse than buying a ticket to Leuven and seeing the 4th annual international improvisation festival.

(Just make sure you go to the Flemish Leuven, not the French one. Not that I would ever make a silly mistake like that. Oh no.)

Showboating on the Rhone

Péniche La Plateforme, Lyon III

I woke up at 10h on Tuesday morning with an immediate sense that there were more things I needed to do in the next two hours than I had managed to do in the entire weekend. My train was leaving from the Gare de Lyon at noon precisely. It had already been difficult enough to get a holiday from my night job, and of course I had to leave my room spick and span for the replacement to stay over. My room being, as it is, my room, was lacking in overall spickness and was in frankly dire need of spannage. Not helpful, then, that one of my superiors here at the hotel decided I also needed a long talk about all the things I'd got wrong on Monday, nor that I also needed to pack and make sure I had my tickets and all that nonsense.

You could argue that I need a course in time management, but there again, getting on the métro at St Paul at 11h53, and still catching a TGV leaving Gare de Lyon at 12h00, is a pretty nifty piece of temporal logistics if you ask me. (And that includes composting the ticket, Timberblog-archive fans!)

The journey down was uneventful other than the faint amusement of observing, out of both corners of my eye, the besuited but podgy middle aged man sitting on my right taking every opportunity to position himself as to gaze at the totally oblivious blonde Sheila sitting on my left across the aisle. (Ah, fleeting train-based lust. I guess we've all been there, huh?)

"Fleeting loves are beneficial and never painful. Love for a station or two is love without pretense and soon forgotten. Any contact beyond that pollutes the emotions and threatens to leave behind recriminations." - Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks, trans. Jeffrey M. Green

The destination, Lyon Perrache, was notable mostly for the absence of the person who was supposed to meet me. Somewhat fortunate, then, that I remembered the name of the quai where the péniche was moored, found it on a map, and was able to make my own way to it. Found my acting friends*, upon which the preparation for our show was mildly disturbed by the police turning up at 4 in the afternoon, flashing their lights, and asking whether we'd seen anyone fall into the river. So we did the show, Lyon seemed to like us, we told Lyon we liked it too. Our friends from Strasbourg followed but dragged out their show for too long (Sarah the kiwi, afflicted with jetlag, fell asleep while watching) before a truly bordellique musical jam featuring Timber and a number of instrumentalists I'd never met before. This stopped at 1am when the police intervened for a second time.

*Friends who act. Rather than replacement friends. As in "acting headmaster" and such. Just to make it clear.

A flotilla of cars then ferried all the performers back to an boarding school in the middle of nowhere - mass lodgings for the week (or, in my case, for the night). Dinner - oh yes, dinner - was served at 2am - no, wait, not served. Yer takes yer ingredients, yer puts em on yer plate, and yer shoves the lot in the microwave fer two of yer continental minutes. Of course this results in everyone being hyper - and remember, this is already a bunch of comic improvisers - everyone drinking a lot, and (perhaps a little less predictably, but what the hell) 20 people playing round-the-world table tennis until 5 in the morning.


Wake up time was, understandably, fairly late this morning. I gave some actors from other troupes their first experiences in improvised singing, before being entertained by the very hospitable Brogh, who lives in Lyon these days and like all Irish girls is gradually turning into Mrs Doyle. And finally made my way to the station, climbed onto my TGV.

"Pardon", I said to the girl occupying the aisle seat next to me as I edged past her. She looked up and smiled. Nice hair, I thought, vaguely, sitting down by the window and taking out a sandwich, a bottle of corporate fizzy sugar, and the intellectual-arse book I'm currently finishing, La religion est-elle une superstition? She took out a sandwich, and a bottle of corporate fizzy sugar. We finished sandwiches at about the same time, which I am going to put down to the prosaic fact that it takes most people roughly the same amount of time to eat a sandwich. I leant on the table and started to fill out some musical copyright forms. She was leaning on the table with a piece of paper, apparently doing some exercises in Arabic, from what I could tell. Nice hair, I thought, vaguely, as I finished my form, put it away, and then sat back, reading my intellectual-arse book in my lap and quite possibly leaning a little towards her in a casual sort of way. She was now working furiously on her lap and quite possibly leaning a little to her left in a casual sort of way. Her hair, which was still nice, was dangling against my sleeve. The armrest wasn't down, and in its absence we may have rested arms more against each other than anything else. She had got some books out about Islam on the table. Hence the Arabic, I guess. I wonder why she looks round like that occasionally. As she goes off into the corridor to answer her mobile, I think of the little note I could slip into her book, and I wonder why she had to be someone from Lyon going to visit Paris, rather than someone from Paris coming back from visiting Lyon. But then, Count Vronsky, why ruin everything?

Ah, fleeting train-based lust. I guess we've all been there, huh?

Surtout n'arrête pas de me raconter ta vie

I have been listening to a fair amount of mid-to-late-nineties dance recently. This is odd. I like indy rock.

C'est pas que je suis timide. C'est que je n'aime pas tes amis.

Gigging at the Louvre

Today we entertained the visitors at the Paris expat fair (see www.expatica.com), held in a salle d'exposition at the Caroussel du Louvre. In exchange we had a promotional stand for the day. This resulted in Clara trying to smalltalk the dude flogging courses in wine-tasting from the stand next door, while the carte blanche opportunity to approach unwitting young ladies and give them flyers produced a strange and unprecedented enthusiasm for marketing from Flo and yours truly.

Added bonus - the organisers presented us with gift boxes of wine and foie gras at the end of the day. Not that I eat foie gras. But, you know.

Meanwhile, it has been brought to my attention that yesterday's entry was a little inaccessible to the average reader. The exact terms used: "your a sad bastard". Thank you dear, your comments are much appreciated, and all criticism is noted. And will be used back at you next time you regale me with your enthralling tales of being stuck at Manchester airport, which once nearly distracted me from looking at the wallpaper.

Oh, and you can't spell.

The great Coldplay conspiracy

One of the major flaws with Oasis’ (“difficult”) third album, Be Here Now, was that most of the tracks seemed to be overblown rehashes of previous Oasis songs. That’s not just an impression you get, it’s also musically true. It’s worth noting here that the opening single, D’You Know What I Mean?, was essentially Wonderwall with distortion and a different chorus (musico-boffs – try the old F#m-A-E-B on both songs). Don’t Go Away’s chorus borrows equally heavily from Whatever. Then again it’s not as if they hadn’t already lifted the E-G#-C#m-A used on both Digsy’s Dinner and Married With Children in order to make She’s Electric on their second album. The less said about the fourth and fifth albums the better.

Now, if you hadn’t noticed, Coldplay released an album earlier this year entitled X&Y. When I first heard the opening bars of Speed of Sound on the radio, I thought to myself (with unwitting intelligence, as it turns out) “hey, someone’s completely ripped off Coldplay”. A few seconds later, when the vocals cut in, “Oh. Wait.” Here’s the science: the chord steps underlying that piano intro are precisely the same ones underlying the piano intro on Clocks, an incredibly successful single from their second album. I’m not saying the two songs are the same – they may have been clever enough to shift the entire pattern up or down a tone or two, unlike Oasis who just play exactly the same chords - but there’s a suspicious similarity.

So out comes the second single, Fix You. And blow me down with a feather duster if it, in turn, is not a complete rip-off of The Scientist, a different incredibly successful single from their second album. Don’t get me going on the Am-F-C-G thing. I’ve lost count of how many songs have become popular in the last ten years on that chord pattern.*

I haven’t bought X&Y. If there’s a song on there that sounds like In My Place, we can assume it will be the next single.

Like football managers bringing in established foreigners rather than nurturing and developing young talent, the music industry continues to play the safe bet – oh look, Am-F-C-G works, it pleases the ear of the average listener, so we’ll just churn out song after song after song. Does anyone want to try and make a successful song from something other than four-chord blocks (one minor, three major, like you wanted sir)? Something other than bars of 4/4 grouped in multiples of four? And hell, can anyone release a boyband powerballad without transposing up one tone for the final chorus?

*Am-F-C-G, the corporate chord pattern. For reference: The Passenger, Iggy Pop; Save Tonight, Eagle Eye Cherry; The Kids Aren’t Alright, Offspring; Glorious, Andreas Johnson; Otherside, Red Hot Chili Peppers; Wherever, Whenever, Shakira; The Scientist, Coldplay; The Space Between, Tracy Chapman; Zombie, The Cranberries; Listen To Your Heart, DHT; One Of Us, Joan Osborne; Complicated, Avril Lavigne; Jeune et con, Saez; Dernière danse, Kyo; Une seule vie, Elle danse seule, AND Au paradis, Gerald frigging de Palmas; Tieni il Tempo, 883; and countless countless others, whether in Am or transposed. Google it and you’ll find hit songs from Russia, Brazil, Finland, Spain, Israel, Iceland…

Adrift with 80 Jehovah's Witnesses

The Gingehovah got married today. After sending me the original invitation, I think she may have picked up my general aversion to 1. big social events with random people whom I'm never going to see again and more particularly 1.(b) Weddings, and ended up offering to pay me hard cash to turn up. At this stage I agreed, as it pays better than teaching English, and in return entertained the guests musically for two hours in the afternoon and another two in the evening.

Stuff that. Buy a digger!

I left the first half of the wedding reception at about 3ish I suppose, ambled along the river with fellow guests and old uni chums Brogh and Tamtam, catching up on however many months of life, and then popped home to have a break and get a little work done before having to return. Climbed the stairs up to my apartment. This is normal. Put the key in the lock and opened the door. This is normal. Was greeted by a large aerosol can standing in the middle of the floor spewing gas that smelt strongly of solvent.

This is not normal.

A man appeared on the stairs. Oh, don't go in, he said. We're fumigating it. Killing the flies.

Mentally noting that going to so much trouble for the two small flies that I remember buzzing around my window when I left this morning was possibly the greatest and most literal example of overkill I had seen this year, I asked the man whether anyone had considered warning me about this turn of events, or indeed consulting me on when would be a good time to do it. I politely registered my irritation with the hotel manager, informing him that I now had four virtually useless hours as I couldn't even use my phone to call someone up and say "hey, it's friday afternoon, my room's being fumigated, fancy going to the flicks?" Apparently there had been an insect issue in room 41, and they'd taken the liberty of making preventative measures in my room on the same floor. I tried to be grateful but found it too much effort.

Ok, so you look in the mirror one morning, your hair is dirty and needs a comb. At what point do you suddenly step back and think, "ah, yes, perhaps I need God's guidance on this"?

But, being the resourceful person you know and love*, I bought some food and read a newspaper, before venting my frustration on the drum kit, which isn't mine, but no-one has stopped me playing it yet. Then left a note to tell the evening receptionist to please open my window when the fumigating dude had left so that the gas had a chance to escape before I came home wanting to sleep. (I enjoy my sleep, but I'd also quite like to wake up again tomorrow and watch the England match).

*Product may differ slightly from illustration.

The time went relatively quickly and I returned to the boat which the Gingehovah had hired out for the two receptions. The evening version was a slimmed-down affair, in the sense that there were 80 people instead of 150, although fattened-up, in the sense that it involved a three-course meal. I hid behind the piano for a fair amount of time, but then decided to step into the arena and stylishly gatecrashed the head table. Gotta love those Witnesses - an Elder had been talking to poor Tamtam at the first reception, and when she made the mistake of mentioning she'd been to a couple of "meetings" with the Gingehovah, he suddenly broke into a jovial "Yes, well, you know, we're just normal people really". Mmm, I thought. Who was the last normal person I met who felt the need to tell people they were normal within ten seconds of meeting? Oh. "Witnessing's really fab you know (I paraphrase), you can go wherever you like in the world, and just pop into a Kingdom Hall, and you've got friends. And not just that, but you know you can trust them." Yes, well, imagine a tiger. He can go anywhere in the world, find a zoo, go into a cage, and find other tigers. But! Away from other animals, how does he eat? He cannot hunt like a tiger in the wild. Without help from the zoo keeper, he dies! This is an absolutely terrible analogy.

Wait - where's the "No!" button?

So, abundant joy was mine when, at the second half (Tamtam and Brogh not invited; Timber = virtually the only non-witness on the boat), I overheard aforementioned Elder speaking to Gingehovah about how That Young Lady Who Was Here Earlier seemed to be "very interested in The Truth."

Brilliant.

I'm trying to look at the naked chick on the front cover of this nice man's magazine, and all I'm seeing is a blur. Hell, it's that pornography distortion thing again... call the doctor!

More fun is available at www.watchtower.org, which is where today's images are taken from.

Got home tonight. Opened door. Had they opened the window to aereate the room for me? Two guesses. No, one guess. Come on. Clue: I'm still up at 01.40 writing my blog. What could possibly be the answer?

I could get used to this

Paul McCarthy's Colonial Tea Cup, at the Hotel Albret last year.

Ok, so the room's small. Smaller than small. But it's cosy, and I find you hardly notice smallness until there's someone else sharing it with you. If I need to stretch my legs, there's a gym in the basement, in which someone has thoughtfully installed a kids' drum kit. Needless to say, me been layin down sum wikkid grooves.

And the area is great. You could look at the local culture, museums, art, architecture, nightlife, all, etc - but frankly, arse to all that, even if it's nice in its own way. No, what is particularly of note is that the Marais is crawling with students. Arty ones. Youngish. I can't help noticing that the typical user of St Paul métro stop is a hot Sheila in her early twenties. Go there some time and check it out. Certainly makes a pleasant change from the bepoodled Babushkas of the 16th, or the fishnet trannies of the maréchaux.

Faybo and I went out for the 4e Nuit Blanche on Saturday. I can report that the Nuit Blanche was rubbish this year. A few weak lighting effects, some Brazilian dancers, and that was about it. Last year's event was an LSD trip without the LSD. This time, there was a sad lack of street cleaning vehicles dancing to cubist music. Not enough children singing badly while flying badly. And definitely not enough giant pink teacups representing the hardships of colonial oppression.

Working week is now up to approx 75hrs.

Paris: World fashion capital, and home of Really Bad Trousers

(The original post appears to have been deleted. So here's a repost with a slight adjustment to avoid further deletage, assuming my theories are correct).

Today I was sitting in the Métro coming back into Paris from Créteil, freshly drenched from some serious rain action announcing that autumn was here and meant business, when I witnessed an unimaginable horror.

Paris is still indisputably one of the major fashion capitals of the world. The French know better than most how to dress well and elegantly, and across the arts they have a deserved reputation for aesthetic style (...over substance). But over the years I have noted a thriving subculture in absolutely appalling trousers. This appears to have spread to Italian teenagers, which considering Italy's reputation for design, is equally odd.

Olly and I observed this subculture in action at the Jazz Festival back in the summer. A girl in bright red and completely shapeless pantaloons was sitting down listening to the music (which really wasn't jazz at all - cf. "15 live acts in one weekend") with her orangely betrousered friend. Your intrepid and ever snappily-dressed blogger started to speculate upon the trousers being the cause of the friendship, or perhaps rather the effect. At this juncture, we were faintly amused at the entry (stage left) of a further young lady wearing shapeless bright blue trousers. Was she another friend? She walked towards the other two, closer and closer, ah yes she must know them, she's right up to them.... and then past.

This man is almost certainly French. We can't see them on this photo, but white socks would be the ultimate confirmation.

Yes, the blue trousers disappeared into the crowd. She had not been a friend of the other two. But five minutes later she reappeared (enter stage right), walked right up to the sitting pair again, slowed down... but again, no sign of recognition, and she passed. Ah, it was clear, blue trousers desperately wanted to make friends with her poorly dressed sisters, but she had been cruelly ignored! What a stinging rejection! I can only conclude that, in bad trouser circles, wearing blue makes you a desperate and irretrievable Melvin.

Imagine how they would deal, then, with the sight I saw today on line 8. A young girl of, I suppose, not displeasing aspect, boarded the train wearing the much maligned skirt-over-trousers look. Consider, then, on top of this, that the trousers were of the shapeless bright red variety, and that the skirt looked like it had been made from 1980s oven gloves. Paris, global fashion capital? My arse.

This sentiment was comforted about fifteen minutes later, when I got off the Métro and entered Monoprix to be greeted with the sight of a serious-looking man, whom I guess would have been in his fifties, wearing a heavy grey trenchcoat, grey trousers, grey jacket, grey shoes. And a pink hat.

He left before you could say "colourblind divorcee."