inutile de dégeler

How I wish living in a francophone country and speaking French everyday was this much fun!

Unfortunately the semi-puzzled, semi-hostile look of incomprehension the girls give the Conchords at the start of the video is something I'm way more used to than the idyllic cycling and colourful baguette-waving that follows.

En faux-scopitone, bien sûr!

Critics seem to like it too, which helps.

But in the meantime you've escaped to greener pastures (not that you're cows or anything remotely bovine).

Hello? Hello?! There's quite an echo in here...

"Any normal language is able to penetrate the most obscure places". Hohoho.

For the last fifteen minutes I've been racking my brains trying to figure out the slightly enigmatic message displayed by the ticker on Formule 1's website.

"9 out of 10 customers are welcomed by member of our staff"  (sic)

What does that mean? What happens to the 10th guy? Is he greeted by a very annoyed rottweiler? Welcomed by a staff member of a rival hotel chain? Checked-in by Marcel Marceau's ghost? Hmmmm.

A few thoughts on a film called Sonatine. This is the plot summary. Not exactly a barrel of laughs, then.

I'll watch anything in Québec French - a documentary about copulating bisons in Ontario avec graphic footage of the male bison's dangling testicles, a reportage on the decline of milk production in Trois-Rivières, the Québec version of COPS, anything. As long as they don't stay schtum and use their quaint accent (yes I do realise how condescending that sounds but I'll stand my ground - quaint it is and I'm not rescinding) I'm happy.

Some actors in Sonatine (particularly the metro train driver) are as wooden as a matchstick reproduction of an IKEA outlet but it's a pretty swell film. Sonatine is also an exercise in cinematographic excess. Its excess goes beyond the explosions, the car spinning, the muscle-flexing, the wisecracking and the sort of excess of action normally associated with mainstream films. It goes beyond the heart-wringing excess of certain art films too. Its excess is an excess of pathos which makes it seem unlikely. The viewer is silently interpelled and quietly and non-violently forced to be different to the rest of the indifferent people around the girls by wanting to communicate with them. He has no option but to be different. It is, after all, the right thing to do for a sensitive, thoughtful cinemagoer. A very Barthes-y* concept dontchathink?

Now, what's unlikely is that they're pretty but they also seem accessible. The excess, or rather the impossibility, lies in the fact that each passenger on the Montreal metro is disinterested in their plight despite how easy it would be to connect to them. It's not another continent, it's another planet. They're two sacrificial lambs offered to the viewers. It reminds you that if saudade ran an online dating agency, most of us watching this film would be takers.

Today I took a metro to no place in particular and ended up at Simonis - a place I hadn't been to in at least three years. I had stayed at a hotel near the koekelberg basilica and imagined I actually lived in this city.

I remembered the fog in the morning around the basilica used to be spectacular. The place looked so Dutch but, somehow, the neighbourhood felt Danish. I had spread out a STIB map on the hotel bed and spent many minutes just observing the names of the stops in both languages and following the bus and tram routes with my forefinger. The glossy map felt and smelt new.

Today there was no fog. A invisible blanket of heat engulfed me as I left the metro station, and there it was - right in front of the metro station with its engine running was the number 87 bus to Basilix. Just where I had left it 3 years ago.

I hope it will still be parked outside the metro station with its engine running when I'm sixty-five.

Anita and I are flat-hunting at the moment. We like Schaerbeek but just need a change I guess.

Yesterday's apartment in St-Gilles looked very promising. A semi-art nouveau block of apartments designed by none other the master of tasteful squiggliness Ernest Blérot.

Blérot definitely put his soul into producing a patina of subdued opulence. The apartment was small but good enough for us. Just one major problem: the kitchen/bathroom. Apartments with a bath installed in the kitchen aren't rare in old Brussels apartment blocks but they usually have some sort of wall or divider of some sort between the two.

This one didn't. You could literally stand up in the bath, butt naked with shampoo on your hair (and on your chest hair if you're particularly hairy) and fry some sardines or prepare a sunday roast. Practical, but aesthetically - and logistically - strange.

The thing that struck me the most was how superficial the building was. Couldn't he have spared five minutes from his recurrent thoughts on stone noodling, squiggles and outweirding Victor Horta to ask the builders to build a wall between the two? I'm an upholder of the virtues of superficiality. I think too many people disregard what seems to be superficial to get to the internal part, losing an important part of the object or subject itself in the process. I happen to like surfaces and surfaces condition my choices as much as much as the actual content does, but in some way this Blérot building went too far considering external factors rather than what will actually be in the building itself. Or maybe it's a bold aesthetic statement I didn't quite understand. Maybe since Victor Horta was reputedly an eccentric heavy drug user (stories about how about how an arsenal of marijuana, opium and magic mushrooms were found in his cellar after his death abound) and Blérot was just a quiet catholic, middle-class architect he felt he just had to outweird him in some other way.

A couple (Brussels apartment viewing is like a bit like an offbeat auction... you're never alone in the apartment) just walked in, recoiled in horror at this odd setup and walked out again without uttering a single word. I'm reasonably sure Blérot would have been amused...

There's something about lazy Sunday afternoons. I don't like them. The impending feeling that you're supposed to be doing something - anything - because tomorrow you won't be in a position to do something - anything - because you'll be at work all day is unsettling and uncomfortable. I always feel I'm wasting my time even when I'm not orhaven't actually got anything better to do.

But last Sunday was a good one. I woke up late, successfully defeating my apparently ingrained urge to wake up and be productive. We later went for a buffet lunch at a Thai restaurant next to the Palais de Justice where I made sure (read forced) my girlfriend overate to avoid the tyranny of the kitchen later that evening. After that we went to Waterstone's and bought some books and newspapers.

I strongly recommend one of these books I bought to anyone who lives in Brussels or has an interest in our city.

It's called Secret Brussels (publisher: Editions Jonglez).

The authors of this book found an astounding number of those hidden gems which eccentric architects or singular bricoleurs-cum-artists had worked on in the last few centuries and successive waves of people have left as a testament to the inventive, healthy eccentricity of the past residents of the city.

I had previously discovered a few myself. I remember trying to enter the 1960s timewarp of a "love hotel", complete with old Behringer speakers blaring out the Love Boat theme, in rue du Berger (near the Porte de Namur; next to Nadine) and have always, and not-so-secretly, dreamt I could afford to buy and restore the Maison Saint-Cyr in Place Ambiorix.

Some places are, however, new to me - the Mupdofer, a private museum of rail memorabilia so obscure that it hasn't even got opening hours - just call and hope someone will be there. Some are even stranger: the lift at the Museum of Modern Art, the former power station of the Société des Tramways Bruxelloises, the  Volkswagen factory in Forest, the Musée des Egouts (Sewers Museum) or the toilets of the Belga Queen restaurant for starters. These and a few others will hopefully be just the ticket to get rid of the pressure of having to make the most out of your Sunday. After all - spending the day staring at truly surreal architecture or broken down colonial machinery rather than doing useful, mundane chores such as shopping for food or hoovering won't reduce your time-wasting guilt or procrastination, but at least they'll make your Sundays more enjoyable!

Walking through the Zoo de l'Orangerie in Strasbourg,Philip Jeck and I were not alone.

His 'Some pennies' (from "7") resonated in my headphones and in the activities of the Italian pensioners
who had just parked their tour bus a few meters outside the back entrance and were now busy taking photos of the tropical birds in the cage to their left. The birds were busy doing what they do best - chirping and hopping tensely from one steel bar to the other. The murmur of transposed electronics and damaged records in my headphones was in some way similar to (but, disappointingly, not exactly like) the errantly geometric way the lemurs in the cages the Italians were taking photos of walk.

The temporality, too, of both activities was complimentary. Jeck's music is a slideshow, if you want, of old records. It's an analogon of reality and so are the pensioners photos. This is the pointless beauty of Jeck's music. His music isn't just the showing of old photos records in a given sequence, but what makes it special is the spectra of temporality itself; of times gone by which probably never existed and of the temporal
beauty of old, yellowing photos superseding the image itself. Hmm... or should that be sepiaing rather than yellowing?

Anyway - in my opinion his music isn't just music. It's a strategy; an emotionally manipulative technique to recall past times which all of us think we remember, but none of us ever lived the way he suggests we did.