The cliché is dead, long live the cliché

Whilst in a class on how to flog the same idea reworked and packaged with sponsorship from McDonalds (aka Marketing Entertainment: Strategies for the Global Marketplace), I learned that there is a film about to shoot in France in which an American will inherit a snail farm and thus have to move to France.  Really?  Who has written this?  Has the writer ever been to France?  Because this to me seems like the laziest concept to be pulled out of a writer's ass for a long time; I'm sure they were very handsomely paid...


Anyway, as much as I want to get on my soapbox and demand why you must all tarnish France with the same garlic coated brush, there is something irrisistabley easy about the French (draw from that what you will...).  So today, as I sit in Le Pain Quotidien roaming the free wifi from Hooters across the street (metaphor for?) I have decided to magnanimously share with you two of the most hilarious clips about France I have recently viewed.     God I miss Paris.


The American perspective, courtesy of Saturday Night Live:

And the British, merci, Catherine Tate:

As we move seamlessly from Jane Birkin to Lauren Hutton: the good karma of celebrity sightings

Before I left I was, as you know, having a love-in with France (like all tempestuous affairs, it was short lived and expensive, I just paid my fucking tax bill...).  And on one of my romantic midnight strolls through Saint Germain after a dinner at the Maison des Polytechniciens (speaker:  François Heisbourg, a leading authority on world strategy; most retained quote of the evening from said speaker:  "Well have you come to quote articles from the Economist to me or do you want to listen to what I have to say on the matter?"  And no, it was not in reference to a question posed by The Euro, I had checked out somewhere in between the crisis in Egypt and the situation in Iran and was casting a comedy desert war drama starring various members of my table (N.B. it's always a comedy war drama when the French are involved, it just is...))  I spied Jane Birkin.

Now, I don't usually get excited about celebrity spots, partly because I never see anyone until it's too late.  Case in point:  when entering a club in Madrid a few years ago some chavvy looking doorman in a tux opened the door for me after a skinny woman in a bright dress left as we were arriving.  That chavvy looking doorman was David Beckham and the skinny looking bird?  His not so well-known wife.  I was only alerted to the fact after the event when my friend kicked me on the arse and asked if I had noticed who that was.  At least I had given him a polite but cursory thank you...

So Jane, glorious, accented, wonderful Jane B.  She was my last and only true celeb sighting in all my years living in Paris, and was out walking the most handsome bulldog on rue de Seine.  I don't normally get excited about dogs either, but perhaps it was the exceptionally dry after dinner musings that had whetted my appetite for the moister things in life, if dogs and Jane Birkin can be described as such...

Anyway, today in the Venice farmer's market we came full circle and I spotted my first celebrity  since the move:  Lauren Hutton.  I'm sure you'll agree that such a smooth segway from Jane Birkin to Lauren Hutton has to be some sort of good omen?  Mais oui.  

Pulling the Rip Cord on your Life. Twice...

Today has not been a good day.  In fact on an emotional level I would say it's been catastrophically, unquestionably dreadful.

Having powered through to the edge fueled only by fear and biscuits, I brought my three-day big push to bring Don Draper home to a close at 11.55pm on Thursday night.  I then took my sorry and under-nourished ass out for a subdued last hurrah with Yorkshire's Finest; it being necessary, after all, to consume an inappropriate amount of bacterially-resplendent fromage (not Bleu Cheese, Isadora, no) before leaving for good.  This, of course, had to be accompanied by a delectable Bourgogne and followed by a cleansing ale, because it was after all, St Patrick's Day.  Anyway, this minor foray into sociability came back to bite me firmly in the ass when I realised that having devoted all my time to my writing, my packing had somewhat suffered (let's be honest, so much remained undone).

When the sweep of an arm into the box technique can no longer be employed because key immigration documents may or may not be somewhere in 'that pile of crap' there is only one thing for it.  Go, and then come back.  It's like one of those fucked up rows you have with your beloved (who at the time is being affectionately referred to as cunt) and after you slam the door to make your sweeping exit you realise that you have left your handbag on the table in the kitchen, and that you have no choice but to go back and get it. Trust me, I know.

So here I am, saying goodbye to my Paris apartment for a second time, having already left it yesterday, to go to a meeting in London as scheduled, because once was just not hard enough.  And at some point, just to really rub salt into an already gaping would, my iPod spat out Tom Waits.  If there was one song I did not need to hear it was this:

 

  When one door closes?  

Only time will tell...

The Redistribution of Self

I'm sitting in a pub in East London, two steps from my old place.  I'm surrounded by some of the most amazing people that I am lucky to know, who are, by far and away, the greatest friends.  I'm wondering why in hell's name I am leaving London for the second time.  Was moving from London to Paris not difficult enough?

Someone I know recently told me that after all their shenanigans abroad, they wouldn't hesitate to stay put, forever.  I didn't quite understand why, until now.

Packing turns over old skeletons.

 The question is, where to bury them...

A Sonoric Soupcon of a Night That Was

Hopa:  it's the Air Guitar 101 you need.  Sure, I promise to sway to the music...

 

See more of the same at Le Caveau des oubliettes

Eat like nobody's watching...

"Eat like nobody's watching; drive like you've never been hurt.  Pray like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth."

A Cynic

 

 

Visions from Cultural Death Row

 You are going to hurt me, please don't hurt me, just one more moment, I beg you!

Guillotined ~ Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, d. 1793

7 days and counting...

And just in case you were going all Springtime in Paris on me, here's a bitch slap to remind you where you really are:

All it takes is a slip of a vowel...