An unusual occurence

There are only two things I really miss about England.
This picture illustrates them both perfectly.

At about 0h30 this morning, something astonishing and unprecedented happened.

I was watching French Eurosport. They were covering sporting briefs, with a journalist Sheila providing the voice-over summarizing a number of the day's sporting events. When suddenly the cricket came on.

This in itself was odd. Since when did Eurosport cover cricket? Shirley it's only relevant to about 5% of the audience (if that). Does British Eurosport cover pétanque or pelote?

So here it was, a summary of the first day's play in the third test between Pakistan and England, and a poor French woman attempting to describe the events to a Francophone audience. It was vague to the point of extremes. The thing about cricket is that it's not always obvious, to the uninitiated, who is "winning". This had obviously made her task all the more difficult. But, the major thing is that here was a French woman talking about cricket. Mike correctly points out that this makes her, by default, my ideal woman. If only I knew who she was. This could be her, but in my opinion it is unlikely:

...just another google image result for "cricket pie".

Ich fühl mich so 50/50

"Que de bonnes nouvelles!" Eddy tells me on the phone. Since we finally got the demo recorded, things are apparently beginning to move a little quicker. Some music industry bigwig wants to listen to our music, and has made noises about looking for a new singer in Eddy's style, to provide vocals on a track that some big French songwriter has written. All sounds remarkably vague to me, it'll probably end up like that tabloid splash a few years back about "top premiership star caught having affair!!" Rumours about who it might be went on for days until it turned out to be, er, Garry Flitcroft. Those of you not familiar with dependable but decidedly average Blackburn Rovers midfielders have the right to ask "who?" at this point.

Secondly, there's an appointment at Radio Courtoisie on Thursday. It's a Paris FM radio station, "plutôt intello", according to Eddy. He's been invited to discuss the music and said he'd mention his fabulous English pianist. That would be Timber, in case you're wondering. And then one of the tracks will be played for the entire capital to hear. Which, for me, is a step up from getting my previous musical project, Q-biq Xpression, and their pioneering album Really Bad Music, on pilot radio in Hull.

Sauf que.

Radio Courtoisie. Suffice to say I've never listened to it. Odd name for a radio station. I found their website. "La Radio Libre du Pays Réel et du Francophonie". Weird tag line. Shifting in seat uncomfortably, a little further sniffing around the internet and suspicions are confirmed: it's a strongly catholic and right-leaning station, borderline nationalist. Last year it received an official warning from the CSA (French broadcasting watchdog) for "inciting hatred or violence for reasons of sex, custom, religion, or nationality." They tend to invite right-wing politicians on for debates, including Le Pen and his National Front colleagues.

I guess when you're an unsigned artist you have to grab every opportunity to make it big. But I'm totally against this. Yes, so our music has, in essence, nothing to do with their political output. But it's like being championed by the Daily Mail, or le Figaro, albeit obviously on a smaller scale... the day we get invited to le Figaro I will also refuse. Principles? Perhaps. Artistic integrity? Maybe. You can make mistakes at the very beginning of your career which have repercussions over everything you do afterwards. People are so willing to give you a label and put you in a box. I do it myself. Even if Radio Courtoisie is holding out the tempting olive branch of free publicity, it just seems hypocritical to sell out to them now, when you're unknown and desperate, if you would never do it later on.

Varvara Prockopuck (le fabuleux destin de)

Something that I am at a loss to explain about myself is a vague attraction to derelict stuff. Perhaps it's a carnal small boy's need to explore things that look unsafe, slightly spooky, and that you're probably not supposed to go into. And somehow it's even better when it's former communist. Breaching the defenses of Prague's enormous Strahov stadium in 2001 (i.e. climbing up a crumbling concrete staircase and through a rusty gate that some vandal had already forced open) was very good indeed.

The Strahov, decrepit and falling apart in 2001.
Biggest stadium in the world. Space for 250 000 spectators. Major flaw: there was absolutely no need for it.
(Now sadly converted into a shiny new training complex. Capitalism huh?)

Giant examples of Soviet monuments, design, and architecture, are of course dotted around the former USSR and the Eastern bloc. Lenin's statues, Stalin's Palaces of Culture, or outsized sports venues and civic buildings that are disused, uncompleted, never filled. I don't know what it is about them exactly. (To put it in pure essay-speak: I find something very evocative about these concrete carcasses making exaggerated eulogies to a flawed and fallen dream. In layman's terms: they're huge, they're wrong, they're ugly, and I can't get enough of them. Mike's blog features a classic example of this kind of thing.) And then there are the great and proud Soviet technological projects:

The legendary Tupolev-144.
Faster, more powerful, and slightly larger than Concorde. Major flaw: it tended to crash.

So we decided we needed to visit these places. Kaliningrad, Moscow, Kyiv, Chernobyl. And most of all, Belarus, the country that tries to pretend the Iron Curtain never came down. I particularly enjoyed the story about President "just call me Dad" Lukashenka dropping the 500-year old national flag, only a few years after finally regaining independence, in favour of a red-green effort designed by a Soviet committee in 1952. And then, as an afterthought, making Russian the offical language instead of, er, Belarussian. The problem being that I speak no Russian at all, and Mike's grasp of the language is rudimentary to say the least. So it would be difficult to get around.

Dinamo Kyiv.

Brilliantly marshalled side that played scintillating football based on secret mathematical formulae. Major flaw: had to sell all their best players.

So we want to go to the former CCCP, but speak little Russian, so ideally need a competent local to take on tour guide duties.

One obvious solution.

Search for English speaking wenches on Belarus bride agencies.

Of course, Timberblog does not approve of these terrible, exploitative meat-markets, promoting the image of the Sheila as little more than a trophy, promising a fake golden ticket to desperate Rich Western Man or desperate Poor Eastern Wummun. Catalogue brides for plastic marriages followed by VISA obtention and quicky divorce. But it's a fabulous way of comparing who you think is fit. I mean, it's a fascinating study in applied psychoanalysis with regard to male sexual instinct and identity. Hey, girls can join in too - just search for "males, age: 40-99, interests: computers". To start with I kind of liked the exotically named Natalia 61503 from Gomel, but decided she might be a bit of a gold-digger, and then became distracted by Varvara the Kazakh. Varvara Prockopuck. Daft name, no wonder she wants to get married.

Varvara Prockopuck.
Enjoys travel, hiking, and playing the piano - like me. Comes from Kazakhstan - cool. Major flaw: has an itchy neck.

There she is. Now I'm sure it's only a matter of time before she googles her own name and finds Timberblog. So, listen, dear, you're 19, that's far too young to be ruining your life getting married to some property speculator dude from New Hampshire. No, you want to be a tour guide. Your home town of Temirtau sounds brilliant, I've been attracted to it ever since I read -

"a grey skyline of mostly redundant smoke-stacks, blast furnaces, residential apartment blocks made from untreated concrete, and the ubiquitous, Soviet, above-ground utility supply pipes." - Simon Forrester, UNV Programme Officer

I was wondering if you'd show me around some day. In exchange I'll, er, teach you jazz piano improvisation, and take you hiking in the beautiful hill country of Créteil, Bondy, and Melun. Yes. And now I'm going to stop making stupid blog entries, walk across the islands, and buy a crepe from Faybo, who is valiantly trying to have as many jobs as I do.

Better than sex. Hell, even better than Lego.

Mike ha detto che l'annotazione scorsa era "una scusa patetica per un'annotazione di blog". Coglione.

Dopo mi ha trovato questo site. Tutti i gol di Euro 2004 sul panno verde del calcio da tavolo. Mazza mia!

Il meglio site che ho visto quest'anno? Fuori di dubbio. Tutto solo, e la ragione per quella ho bisogno di tornare abitare in italia. Italia ti amo. Subbuteo ti amo. Mike... in gimporama sei una belva.

Intertextuality in brutalist architecture

Trellick Tower, North Kensington, London

Ian Fleming named his evil Bond villain "Goldfinger" after the man who designed this building.

I can kind of see where he was coming from.

Meanwhile...

...this Le Corbusier building, part of the Cité des 4000 at La Courneuve, is named after Honoré de Balzac.
Anyone who's been forced to read 19th-century realist French literature will deeply understand why this is fitting.

And to conclude today's architecture lecture:
Portsmouth's Tricorn Centre, demolished in 2004. Seen here depicted in, er, yes, Lego. Sorry, couldn't resist.
...a new toy every day, huh? Further works of legocentric genius here.

Nattering with supermodels

"I found this pen left in my room," she said, handing me a horrendous biro with some kind of blue-faced vampirical cartoon character on the end of it. "Oh brilliant," I smiled, "that's horrible. Thanks." She was quite pwitty, if a little shy perhaps. We had a chat and she said she was often in Paris, staying at our hotel on her own; then told me I should eat at the restaurant next door some time, and pick some dish which involved figs. I said I'd have to try it out (if I'm feeling particularly smooth, maybe I'll take her next time she's around...), thanked her for the pen, and got on with my work.

Yip, not much happened this evening, folks.

Intriguingly, she'd written on her fiche d'étranger that her occupation was "fashion model". Idly googled her name. About 4,000 sites come up, most of them involving photos. She's vaguely famous. Perhaps this is why:

Erika Stromquist. Nice girl. Swedish. Likes figs.

Color & Light, Glamour (US), Feb 1999, p.187. Photography: Pasquale Abbatista.

The Wrong And Winding Road

A cd was slipped into my hand on Friday night. Result: casual narcissism. Music I'm currently listening to - Myself.

Old people, and anyone who bought the album "1", will know that The Long And Winding Road was the Beatles' last ever number one record, hitting top spot in the US in 1970 despite not doing anything in the UK. It's almost certainly the only ever hit single to be inspired by the B842. And it was also one of the six reasons Paul McCartney gave to the court when splitting the band up as a legal entity.

Songs are quite precious to their writers. If someone takes your song and meddles with it, it's a bit like, say, having your new born baby taken away by the nurse and painted green.

Jake and Dinos Chapman
Insult to Injury, 2003
Series of "rectified" prints from Francisco Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra etchings

McCartney wrote the song as a deliberately stripped-down piano ballad. The original recorded version featured some inept bass from Lennon, who by all accounts was a particularly bad bass player. And that was it. Voice, piano, bass. Imagine his reaction, then, on finding that before releasing the song, producer Phil Spector had added 18 violins, four violas, four cellos, three trumpets, three trombones, two guitars, and a choir of 14 women.

Now this is where I can empathise.

Someone has taken my minimalist piano ballad and added a bloody accordion.

Bad Poetry Competition

In the small hours last night, trying to go to sleep, I flicked onto some pop music show on TF1. "Et voici," the presenter was in the middle of saying, "Katie Melua avec son nouveau single, Nine Million Bicycles." Katie Melua has only been big in Britain since I left the country, so I thought I'd listen and see what the fuss was about. On comes aforementioned Georgio-British soft-pop songtstress gently cradling her acoustic guitar. "Excellent," I thought, as a few bars of unchallenging guitar picking opened the song, "this will have me asleep in no time." Then she opened her mouth.

"There are nine million bicycles," she smooched, "in Beijing". Mmm. So far, so educational. "That's a fact." Right. (Was this penned by a trainspotter?). "It's a thing we can't deny." Facts are generally things that you can't deny without looking a bit silly. You don't need to ram home the point, dear. Where is this leading to exactly? "Like the fact," (oh, a comparison), "that I will love you till I die."

The last time I saw anyone labour anything that much, she gave birth to a baby elephant.

William Holman Hunt
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1876, oil on canvas

Still, it got me thinking about the worst poetry I have ever seen published. Occasionally, people are willing to do utterly inhumane things to the language in order to get a rhyme. New Order are usually good for some terrible lyrics, with one outstanding example being "Love, it's like honey, you can't buy it with money" (Crystal), which leaves me extremely nonplussed, or "The sea was very rough, it made me feel sick, but I like that kind of stuff, it beats arithmetic" (Slow Jam). Then there is Mike's favourite: "Love juice, love juice smells like... (beat) ...stale fish". The latter was, however, from a joke song performed as an encore for a crap audience in New Zealand, so not exactly a commercial release.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says that the absolute worst poetry in the galaxy was written by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex. A spot of internet research reveals that this is a warped version (for legal reasons) of Paul Neil Milne Johnstone, and if you wish you can read about him, and his poetry, here.

But for me, the single worst line of poetry in all existence is to be found at the end of verse 48 (yes, 48!) of Isabella or the Pot of Basil, by the celebrated 19th-century English poet, John Keats. You could argue that perhaps he'd run out of inspiration by this stage of the work, but in fact (without wishing to be dismissive...) all 63 verses form a grotesque paean to epic dross. Here, Isabella is digging up the earth, trying to find the grave of her lover - who incidentally was called Lorenzo, and not, sadly, Basil. Read, observe, and enjoy her reaction.

That old nurse stood beside her wondering,
Until her heart felt pity to the core
At sight of such a dismal labouring,
And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,
And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:
Three hours they labour'd at this travail sore;
At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
And Isabella did not stamp and rave.