Timber's weekend excursions N°2

Spent most of yesterday signing my soul away to the dude who's decided to produce us. It's the same guy who's giving us full use of his professional recording studio for free as often as we want, so I guess he deserves to make a little bit of money out of us if anything happens. Unfortunately, to have any sort of career in France you need to have filled in at least sixteen pieces of paper sent in triplicate to four different organisations each. Meanwhile our latest demo CD is virtually finished and, more to the point, will be in the hands of the director of A Major Recording Company by Wednesday.

After all that I woke up at the thoroughly ridiculous time of 07h30 this morning. It was snowing lightly, and after briefly surfing the excellent Archiguide for a few minutes, I decided that I needed to go to Pantin. Twinned with Moscow, as Fran points out, so it must be pretty cool.

More to the point, it is the home of the Grands Moulins de Pantin. This is the kind of building that Timbers can't resist. It's a huge flour mill just outside Paris on the Canal de l'Ourcq, part uncompromising heavy industrial factory, part majestic German castle. Built in 1923, the mill was heavily damaged during WWII but fully reconstructed in 1944. Production ran until 2000 and the site was completely shut down three years later.

Which is arse, because it means you can't go in there any more (though whether I'd want to so much if it wasn't abandoned, derelict, and unsafe, is open to question - cf. Timberblog archives and the entry about the Strahov). My new lifetime ambition is to write a 7-minute industrial hard rock anthem and use various parts of the Grands Moulins as the backdrop of the video. Preferably floodlit at night and with plenty of fire and smoke going on. Unfortunately it seems that some idiots around a table in central Paris want to demolish most of it and redevelop the site into shiny office blocks. This is why I need a record deal, and fast...

(...if I sell enough cds I'll just buy the whole factory myself and possibly live in it.)

Consult the Flickr link in the side bar for further photoage. And on a different subject, if you've ever caught yourself thinking that it would be a good idea to buy a small model railway for your 10-year-old child: please look at this page first. And don't say I didn't warn you about the consequences.

Ma chi sono io?

Supergirl asked me for a cigarette last night. I didn't have one, but happened to be carrying a maraca at the time, so offered her that instead. She seemed quite pleased with it. But then, she was spectacularly drunk. So I talked to Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde instead.

I was only able to be there for an hour, so didn't bother dressing up. This is fine because when people ask who you've come as, you can tell them to guess, and enjoy the various struggles to answer. Beats being one of the Zorros, anyhow. Meanwhile Clara is convinced I am Harold from 1970s cult classic Harold and Maude.

I don't shag OAPs though. Just wanted to make that clear.

Separated at birth

Düsseldorfer Partnerstädte

This morning I was in a weird mood. The sort of hyperactive thing where you feel like writing a novel, attaining fluency in an obscure oriental language, and completing a small photoproject on 1960s architecture before lunchtime. Why the hell I was feeling so active I don't know, I didn't even sleep all night. Maybe it was the cheap Cola?

Well I've managed the photoproject and have entitled it Jumelages fantastiques.

You are probably aware of the concept of Twin Towns. They seem to exist largely for the purpose of facilitating school language exchanges, as far as I can tell. Anyway. There is a suburb to the north east of Paris called Bobigny. It is, for whatever completely tenuous reason, twinned with the Portuguese town of Setubal. I have a feeling the Portuguese might not quite understand what they have let their schoolkids in for. Witness:

This is the Town Hall in Setubal.

This is the Town Hall in Bobigny.

There's not a lot more I can say.

Brajor Fain Muckage

I have been introducing Beave to the pubs of Paris. I think we're up to 5 different ones already. Saturday was the Bowler, for rugby, and girls who said yah and wanted to talk about Cowes week and the Henley regatta. This passes me by a little, so I read the paper instead.

Friday was the Auld Alliance, and a night of Brajor Fain Muckage. It was ok to start with. Beave and I popped in there for a pint, and found that not only were they showing Reading - Southampton, but that Reading were already 1 goal to the good. Result, we thought, and sat down to watch.

So there I was with Beave, and you talk about old schoolfriends and so on. Then - as I guessed might happen - in strolls Eddy (who keeps asking me to introduce him to my friends, but I never get round to it) with a couple of his friends. So we start chatting, the problem being that I talk to Beave in English (obviously) and Eddy in French (obviously). This gets quite messy and very very franglais and a bit confusing. Probably not the moment, then, that you need to deal with Chief Leaf randomly turning up, who is of course a university friend and thus from another sphere completely.

And I can't cope with being social at the best of times.

Meanwhile we've also done the cosy Bombardier at Place du Panthéon, and the Mazet, which unfortunately was named after André Mazet, and not Edouard Mazet. Edouard was a legend. Observe:

Edouard Mazet's 1884 plan to alleviate Paris traffic.
For some reason it didn't catch on and they built the métro instead.

As you can see from the picture, Mazet's plan basically involved a sort of barge-shaped thing which travelled along lines of lampposts. He called it "The New Metropolitan Railway - without Rails, Wagons, Bridges or Tunnels". So, sort of like a pub without drink, seats, people, or walls.

He argued that building underground railways would never work, unless the city had been designed with them in mind from the very beginning. If not, there would be sewers, pipes, and so on, in the way. Of course, he also argued that an underground railway would not be constructed before a town existed, because there would be no need for it. (A settlement has existed on the Paris site since 3rd century BC, but believe it or not neither the Celts nor the Romans had the foresight to install the tunnels which would accommodate underground trains as soon as the technology became available a mere 1800 years later.) To the suggestion of overground railways, he noted that building bridges across Paris, and in front of historic monuments, would be very ugly. And so his solution was born.

Propulsion was supposed to be either by an on-board motor powered by steam, electricity, or petrol, or via a cable-car style rope attached to the lampposts. Quite what sort of propulsion the motor was supposed to power is apparently moot.

He was a Merchant Navy Captain, and was being completely serious. Personally I think it would have been a brilliant idea, if it wasn't for the several thousand major flaws involved. You can read all about this genius man here.

The best suggestion wins a cake

I have decided that I need to see Brazil. Chakkers said it's good, and I realised that after idly chatting to an American tourist on the Amsterdam-Paris train last week who turned out to be 60s blues singer Geoff Muldaur, that I have now met its lead male, one of the supporting cast, and the writer of the theme music. Not something I can say about many fillums, and as good an excuse as any to watch it, really.

Meanwhile I was called upon this weekend to accompany a French beginners' improvising class in their first performance, at a little theatre in the 12th. The problem is that a combination of 1. spending far too much time in A-level English messing about with word games, obscure grammatical formulae such as zeugma and syllepsis, or ridiculous over-interpretation of text, and not paying any attention to the teacher whatsoever beyond checking which book you were supposedly studying in that lesson in order to have it placed smartly in front of you on the desk (I heartily recommend this course of action - it got me, and several classmates, an A), 2. regularly reading James Richardson's Italian football reports, and their abundant use of ludicrously elaborate similes, in the Guardian, 3. having a mind that does occasionally wander during impro performances, 4. there being several comely young French maidens on stage on Saturday afternoon (this is perhaps not unrelated to point 3.), and 5. knowing that I was meeting up with Beave in the pub afterwards and that 90% of his sentences would begin "I was at [ x ] today and there was this well fit bird," provoked the realisation that I needed to stock up on some new similes - in this particular case to express relative hotness - otherwise conversation could get a little repetitive.* So, basically, I am calling on you to be creative: I need different ways to fill in the gap, "she is as hot as a ________".

The first two pages of a Google search for "she's as hot as a" offers:
"...flame" (Aerosmith - far too formulaic)
"...two dollar pistol" (Your Choice, Quality Adult Erotica - meaningless, and not even erotic)
"...Mexican stop sign" (poster on ryanadams.org - creative, if not totally coherent)
"...cowgirl riding bare-back bucknaked in the middle of july!" (rezfox.com Native Online Dating - trying far too hard, and special minus points for the redundant exclamation mark)
"...chilli pepper that's been smothered in curry sauce and microwaved for ten minutes." (rottentomatoes.com Forums - a reasonable effort, although something more succinct would be preferable)

Girls (+ liberals and homosexuals**) can join in too, just replace the "she" with a "he". And let your creative juices flow. Knowing you lot, you will either post about something completely different, or not comment at all.

* New record long sentence on Timberblog.
** This is a reference. To something most of you won't have heard. So it's probably a bad reference.***
*** Oh dear. This is also a reference.