Time before Tuesday: the con in Cannes

Dear all,

I guess none of us can get by in life without lying from time to time. Some make it a way of life, - an art form - but I’ve never had a memory good enough to even consider that route.

But now that the overblown media orgy of endless red-carpet photo-ops, over-hyped trailers and brain-dead-boring directors’ press conferences of the 60th Cannes Film Festival has safely drawn to a close, I’m once again reminded of how my old friend Vince and I BS’d our way into getting a free pass into every film shown 24 years ago at the 1983 edition.

We had been studying French for eight months at the Université de Grenoble III and been living with French families for a bit longer, so our language skills were already pretty good. The two of us had even made a pact never to speak English with each other while playing tennis or on ski trips, we were that serious about learning French.

So after exams and with time on our hands, we pile into his little 2CV car and headed south to the Mediterranean. We arrive in Cannes about two days after the festival has started, spending about a day walking around and gawking. That got old really old really quick though, so we start to wonder how, without being journalists or celebrities and with absolutely no connection whatsoever with the film industry other than being regular paying movie-goers, we could somehow get into seeing at least a couple of films. They don’t sell tickets.

So the second morning - after sleeping a night on the beach cuz all the hotels were booked and back then they didn’t have those gawd-awful tents strung up and down the main stretch - we decide to head for the main accreditation centre to see what’s up.

We go inside the lobby and off to the left in the corner, a bored-looking fat man with a long, bushy beard is seated at a booth flipping through a magazine. We go up to him and say “we’re here to get our accreditation, please.”

” Ah, oui, bien sûr, of course, can I see your invitation please?

Here’s where it began. Unscripted, seat-of-the-pants merde de la vache perdue as we used to say in elementary school for some reason.

“Uh, we’re American students of French cinema and we’ve been sent down from from the University of Grenoble to do a report focusing on the similarities and differences between a French, an American, and a third film of our choice as it pertains to …”

“That’s OK,” he says. “I don’t need the details Do you have a letter from your cinema professor?”

I look at Vince. “You were the one who went to pick it up that day. You’ve got it, right?”

“No way,” he says. “I gave it to you the other day while we were packing. It’s in the blue envelope.”

The fat guy is rolling his eyes by now at our little piece of impromptu cinéma, so he says, “you DO have student cards from the University of Grenoble, don’t you?”

“Ah oui, bien sûr!” we say, whipping them out.

“OK,” he says, pointing over to the right. “Go over there and get your photo taken and come back to me when you’ve got it.”

This, then, is the grin you get when you know you’ve just told a bald-faced lie, don’t care, and can’t believe you’re about to embark on a week-long movie-watching binge.

Those were all simpler times, of course. No biometric ID, no taking off your shoes or dumping liquids before boarding planes, no facial recognition technology. There’s no way we’d be able to pull that off today.

all for now,

Ian

PS: Those with a little knowledge of French will have caught the bilingual pun in the title.

PPS: I don’t recommend binge movie-going, even if it is for free and there are sometimes canapés in the lobby. Because Cannes is a place to shop films whether they’re destined for Oscars or the dollar-bin at Blockbusters, you can see the worst trash in the morning and a masterpiece in the afternoon. You come out of it feeling like you’ve eaten a huge buffet dinner night after night, never remembering whether you’d had filet mignon, lobster, peanut butter sandwiches or humous with pita - maybe you have, right after the other, but you’re so dazed and bloated you can’t remember. Six films a day for a week and I can recall the name of only one of them: Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Given the restaurant scene in that film,  it’s rather appropriate.

Advice column moves to front page

Today the Letters editorial board has decided to move the wildly popular largely ignored and perennial object of scorn and abuse Dear Lanny Anders advice column to the front page. Lanny has been a bit of a sloth for the last little while, apparently away doing research into the inner contours of various bottles of rare scotch whiskey brands, but he recently dropped by the office to regale us with tales of his travels and debauchery, which we enjoyed at a safe distance since he stunk like a goat. The mailbag is therefore stuffed to the brim with queries from the great and good from around the globe, and now that he’s had a good hosing down we’ve allowed him to get to it. Please bear in mind that our taste warning still stands: if you are at all averse to the occasional reference to how each and every one of us got here or the enjoyment thereof, yet choose to continue, good for you. All complaints in regard to the humourous quality of this post should be addressed to: Air Canada, 515 Bloor St. West, Toronto ON Canada. R6B 4B0

Dear Lanny Anders,

My wife and I are recent newcomers to Germany and are having a lot of trouble adjusting to life in our new home. Though we’re Americans and we love the European lifestyle, and have enjoyed discovering our city as well as weekend trips to neighbouring ones, something is missing. OK, I’ll get to the point: our sex life is suffering. Is this a normal thing for new arrivals? I expected some adjustment problems, but this is really getting me down. Oh yeah, now that I have your attention, there’s one other problem: we haven’t been able to make the adjustment to metric. I’m always buying half the amount or paying twice as much as I think I should, because everything is in kilos instead of pounds. Damn metric system anyway.

Signed,

at sixes and sevens.

Dear Numbers,

Your problem is quite common to new arrivals from the USA and the solution is quite simple. Just remember this simple conversion formula next time you are either shopping or thinking of going horizontal:

What’s sixty-nine in metric?

One-eight-one.

________________________________________

Dear Lanny Anders,

Damn, last time I heard that one, the boys and I were sitting around the campfire, roasting mammoth meat. Don’t you have anything original? I’m about to change the channel to Jon Stewart.

signed,

tired of the same old same old

Dear Tired,

Jon Stewart is merely Jay Leno minus the chin and shown at a decent hour! Didn’t Leno blaze a trail for young Jon with his Headlines routine? Absolutely brilliant! Stewart took that and spun it into his own show. You want derivative? I’ll show you derivative, mate! (editor’s note: at this point we had to physically restrain Lanny, who was about to pour hot coffee into her his monitor. )

____________________________________________

Dear Lanny Anders,

As you are very well aware, sometimes it is extremely difficult to be a celebrity. My husband Tom and I are absolutely shocked and appalled that some floozy is going to lose her virginity in her very first porn movie. And she’s calling herself Katee Holmes! I am so embarassed, I want to crawl in a hole and read the collected works of L. Ron Hubbard once again just to please my husband. Imagine, abusing my name like that. I bet she’s not even losing her virginity, that it’s all an outrageous lie.

signed,

the real Katie Holmes

Dear Really Katie,

Oh come on, don’t gimme that. You love the attention. You all do! Short of an anti-semitic tirade, a frizzy-haired photo-op or conviction for axe murder, positive or negative it’s all good for the career, right? But I agree with you on the outrageous lie thing. This scam reeks like putrified poodle poop. She’s from Victoria, BC Canada, right? Say no more! I hear that’s why Jesus wasn’t born there. They couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin.

____________________________________________

Dear Lanny Anders,

No really, we’re going to sue their sorry asses half-ways to breakfast. I know we’ll win the case too, because we have the Church of Scientology on our side. Once I get up on the stand and explain how Xenu, the alien ruler of the Galactic Confederacy 75 million years ago brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling DC-8s and stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs to release these alien souls which still causes ill-effects on humans to this very day, why, they’ll say CASE CLOSED!

I promise not to jump up and down in my chair though. They might think I’m a wacko.

signed,

Tom Cruise

Dear Mr. Cruise,

uhh… 10 - 4!

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

There was an absolutely fascinating article in Der Spiegel a couple of weeks ago about people who fall in love and want to have sex with objects. Computers, steam locomotives, the Berlin Wall, the World Trade Centre, you name it, there are people who want to sleep with it.

One man was described as seeing his Macintosh laptop as male, so he had to regard his relationship with it as a homosexual one.

The Swedish woman who was in love with the wall was devastated when the tide of history turned. The woman whose “lover” was “publicly executed” on September 11, 2001 has had a 1:1000 scale model built for both towers, complete with aluminum exterior so that she can take them with her to cuddle in the bathtub.

The 41-year-old man at left fell head-over-heels for a Hammond organ at the age of 12. He is now in a monogamous relationship with a model steam engine.

The article was in the Science section. It had quotes from the people depicted, from experts on why some people love things instead of other human beings, what they get out of it, and so on.

But that’s not what I want to focus on. What I do want to point out is that this article is being distorted in a blog beyond recognition, used as an example of how nasty the German media is. The blog post bears almost no relation to the thrust of the article. It merely uses it as fodder for the blog’s overall agenda, which is to illustrate the so-called biased and unfair treatment the Excited United States of America receives from German media across the board. It even provides a link to the Spiegel’s online edition for knee-jerk reactive types to email in their outrage.

Ignoring the other cases portrayed and conveniently snipping out the photo of the man with the choo-choo-train, all it says is, “It doesn’t matter that nearly 3000 people died in those buildings. Now it is apparently OK to exploit them for tasteless stories on people with sexual perversions.”

What he fails to mention is that the woman fell in love with the buildings when she was eight years old, long before the terrorist attacks. He also fails to mention that it is a sensitive piece without a shred of sensationalism or voyeurism, ending with the remark that these people are the way they are, they aren’t harming themselves or anyone else with their unusual desires, and who can say that of anyone?

I was going to ignore this post completely, because why draw attention to crap, but then again, if somebody is spewing right-wing bullshit about German media to an audience most of whom probably can’t even read the language of the media being attacked, someone has to set the record straight.

Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less if you’re a loony lefty from la-la-land, a foam-at-the-mouth right-winger with an arsenal of loaded guns in the basement or so undecided you straddle the fence keeping both ears to the ground waiting to see which way the wind blows, if you’ve got an axe to grind don’t lay out examples which have no basis in reality.

Unless of course you’re going for a Masters in Intellectual Dishonesty, in which case you’re headed for top of the class.

Doing a double-take on Monocle magazine

Dear all,

A couple of weeks ago I bought a copy of Monocle, a new magazine created by Tyler Brûlé. He’s that Canadian publisher I suppose is best known for launching the highly successful style and fashion magazine Wallpaper a few years back.

The magazine caught my eye not only because I’d recently read a short write-up about his new venture, but that the May edition has two articles on things near and dear to my heart: one on bicycles and cycling, another on the city of Hamburg. Always on the lookout for English-language reading material that is neither too British nor too American, I thought the 12-euro gouge price was worth it, so I bought it without even flipping much through the pages.

I don’t think I’ll pick up another copy though. It has the look and feel of a magazine whose publisher couldn’t decide whether to come out with another glossy fashion, gadget, design and superficial urban lifestyle work, or something similar but printed on weightier matte paper to convey a sense of gravitas to the social and political angles given to some of the articles. The result is a mish-mash of disconnected stuff, and although you’ve enjoyed reading what they’d bothered to print, you’re left wishing the subjects had been given a little more time and research. Sprinkled throughout are what amounts to printable soundbites, cutesy headlines for various bits of this and that, a few half-hearted fashion pages that don’t set well on the greyish paper, an astoundingly incongruous pull-out manga cartoon that just screams, “see - we’re cutting edge!” and you have to ask yourself: just where are they hoping to find people to read this? Think in-flight mag with a dash of shit or hell thrown in now and then in an effort to chase the blandness away.

The section on Hamburg was particularly disappointing. I’ll admit it was fun comparing the writer’s idea of a wild night on the town or a cool place to live with my own, but I already knew that we don’t live in the trendiest neighbourhood around, and that going out more often is going to depend a lot on when the new bar-and-restaurant smoking laws kick in. By that time the places listed will have either closed or I’ll be 97 and long since swapped verbal incontinence for physical. There haven’t been any street riots or mass arrests outside our front door over the past four weeks either, so we must be doing something right. Pity those who jumped at the chance to take his cool-places-to-live recommendations at face value.

The absolute killer is the Hamburg section’s main article.   If you are prone to seizures or cringe uncontrollably, I advise you to read no further.

Indeed, the politicians want to reposition Hamburg as a benchmark for all modern cities. And if that’s not enough to convince you of the city’s investment potential, just imagine how you could tell people “I’m a Hamburger” with relish.

Half-blind and shaking, I nearly sliced off a fingertip on a loose razor blade scrambling to find the Visine bottle at the bottom of the drugs drawer, desperate for a good squirt or two to wash away the aftermath of coming across such an awful, AWFUL pair of sentences in a publication I actually plunked down good money for. Meaningless, biz-speaking wanker’s twaddle followed by the oldest, hoariest, groan-and-gag-me joke about Hamburg in the book?

Just in case nobody believes it…

OK, I admit to coming out with a few cornball one-liners, some tired and reworked word turds myself, but hey, this is a blog fer crissakes. I’m not counting on it to pay the rent, and you sure as hell don’t have to throw away 12 euros for it.

All for now,

Ian

PS: Now that the initial shock has long subsided and I’ve forced myself to take a second look at the offending article, I must give the writer the benefit of the doubt. After all, who would dare submit a closing like that and expect to be asked to write anything for them ever again? This is what happens when you let Homer Simpson some editor/desk jockey have final say over your copy.

Tiny moments of joy in the city

Dear all,

One of the great things about living in Europe is the ease at which you can take off for a neighbouring city just to hang out. Not that just hanging out automatically qualified us as locals, or somehow cool. With our rental bikes, late-40s looks and mostly dope-free lifestyle, my wife and I know very well that we’re neither.

It’s just that by the time you’re on your third visit to Amsterdam, you have the freedom to sail on past the three-hour queues for the Royal Museum and Anne Frank House and take a pass on the Heineken brewery tour without feeling you’ve missed a thing. You’ve either seen it all before or know you’ll be back sometime when the summer crush of tourists is over.

And if you take the time for the city to visit you, instead of the other way around, tiny moments of spontaneous joy are what you’ll take home.

From the market on Albert Cuypstraat

From a canal whose name is forgotten

From a brooding sky

with time to enjoy

Riding along a canal mid-afternoon we came upon a cluster of cyclists gazing into a courtyard. There were at least 80 people facing us in four rows up against the far wall, the light filtering through two enormous plane trees casting a dappling shadow on their faces. They were rehearsing for a concert coming up this weekend. The surrounding high walls worked like a makeshift amphitheatre, their voices carrying Bach’s High Mass up through the leaves to spill out into the canal beyond.

In a way I’m glad we won’t be around to see the actual concert, because what we heard over that half-hour or so was just unexpected reconfirmation that by enjoying the moments as they happened to us instead of following a plan or schedule, we were doing the right thing. As our friend Helen said back at her place the next morning, it was one of those rare moments when even on the shortest of visits, tourism can become travel.

All for now,

Ian

Time before Tuesday: the wrong way to get rid of a psycho

Next week marks one year since the day I discovered I had unwittingly let a screwed up person invade my personal space. That discovery led to a delayed-action screaming match and the realisation that if I had to do it all again, I’d do it right this time.

There are damaged people walking the streets and haunting the halls everywhere. You can usually give them a wide berth and go on your way. But what if the realisation their elevator doesn’t even go half-way to the top floor only dawns on you when they’re standing right beside you?

I told this story to a very good friend who lives in Hong Kong. Here is a copy of the email I sent him. Language not cleaned up for public consumption:

I was on my bike heading home around noon with two rear paniers stuffed with gorceries waiting at a traffic light at an intersection where a commuter train bridge lies overhead. A train was passing, so the traffic and train noise combined to a deafening roar.

Suddenly I get this weird feeling that someone is close by. I turn around and there’s this long-haired blond guy about my height, maybe a little taller, only inches away with his arms up over his head like some sort of gorilla, his eyes bulging out and screaming YEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHHH, like he was King Kong and I was his frail young victim. I took one look at him, waved him away dismissively like, puh, get lost ya freak, crossed the street, looked back once but kept on riding.

This town is full of loonies, gotta watch out.

At least that’s the story I told around the lunch table when the little red-haired girl got home from school. Message being: you shouldn’t tangle with psychos, sweetie, because all they want is your attention or a reaction.

Later, I told my wife what REALLY happened.

I actually first gave the guy the finger, thrusting my fist two inches from his face before turning around to cross the street. Then I stop, turn around and, still straddling the bike, take a good look at him. He’s dressed in normal clothes all right, but he’s got that way of carrying himself like he’s used to causing trouble. The ex-con look, muscles on him like he’d filled some of his time in the prison weight room. He’s not drunk, not on drugs that I can figure.

He gets closer, looking right at me. I can see he’s got a safety pin dangling from his left ear. I know I shouldn’t be doing this, and I really don’t know why I did, but I spread my arms as if to say, “what the fuck, guy? What is your greatest problem?”

Then he spreads his arms and says something like, hey biker, you sayin’ something to ME?

I pedal a few more feet past a group of people waiting at a bus stop, hit the brakes, turn around again, and wait for him to approach me. Just as he’s about six feet away, he says to me in German while still walking, “hey biker, get lost, get the fuck out of here, keep pedaling man.”

Everyone standing around waiting for the bus is by now staring at us, taking in the scene like it’s definitely not something being played out for what passes for Candid Camera around here.

He’s almost within swinging distance when I start to let out this stream of abuse in English like I’ve never heard myself utter before, a raging torrent of threats, bile and invective gushing forth onto the sidewalk, over the traffic and so loud as to bounce off the buildings on the other side. Even as I’m yelling all this I’m thinking, “this is lunacy, the guy could be carrying a knife, he’s more mobile than you, you’re trapped and still straddling the bike, just get the hell out of there.”

I guess he’d been taking lessons at psycho-Berlitz, because now he’s saying to me in pretty clear English, “but I don’t understand what you are saying, what do you say, hey man, fuck, shitting piss… “

But he was backing up slowly as he said it, so I guess I called his bluff.

Since that day I haven’t seen the guy skulking around my haunts, but if I did I would just ignore him. Best not to pay attention to these types in the first place. Funny thing is, I knew that from the first instant he got near to me, but I chose to do the wrong thing anyway. Does getting too close to a psycho cause you to do stupid things? Or do they merely bring out the worst in you?

Fenced-in G8 leaders would be better off on a German island.

You may have noticed a few items out of Germany in the news this week, most notably the many arrests made in a half-dozen northern German cities, including Hamburg.   The government is cracking down on anyone from the far left / anti-globalisation scene because they are considered a disruptive influence or possible terror threat ahead of the Group of Eight summit in Germany early next month.

The arrests have pissed off a lot of people here not only for the heavy-handedness in the way they were carried out but the fact that some of those taken in are going to be held in custody for up to 14 days as a precautionary measure in case they actually do commit some crime.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve been asleep all this time, but isn’t the presumption of innocence before being proven guilty one of the cornerstones of a free society?  How can someone be charged with intent to protest or disrupt a meeting?  By the way he cuts his hair?

This latest flap is just another in a series of wrongheaded moves the German government has made in hosting this year’s G8 gabfest.  For years now a comatose non-event with a rigid schedule, staged photo-ops and a closing declaration written months in advance full of lofty ideals and vague, unfulfillable goals everyone forgets as soon as the TV lights dim, the G8 summit has no real reason to exist anymore in its present form beyond serving as a global grandstanding platform for the host country and to provide some bland, pre-packaged pap for the world’s media.

The only thing left to chance is what the protestors might get up to, so this week’s arrests should come as no surprise since they are part of an attempt to increase security and prevent a repeat of the fiasco that was Genoa in 2001, when police killed one protestor during violent clashes.

Germany has already budgeted more than 100 million euros for this summit, 16 million of that for a 12-km long steel, concrete and barbed-wire fence to ring the area surrounding the small but oh-so-swanky Baltic Sea resort venue.   Smart move.   Not only does it conjure up images of another wall Germans fought so long and hard to be torn down 17-odd years ago, but it will serve as an obvious focal point for the 100,000 protestors expected to flock to the area.

But if the host government was indeed serious about security beyond deploying 16,000 police and 1,100 soldiers - and saving a whack of cash in the process - they could have taken advantage of what geography has already provided and simply held it on any one of the many North Sea islands dotting the coast from the mouth of the Elbe near Hamburg to the Danish border.

The island of Amrum would have been perfect.  Isolated on three sides by miles of mudflats where swift-rising tides swallow up anyone stupid enough to wander around at the wrong time, the only other access is by ferry through a narrow channel.  A frigate or two patrolling the open ocean to the west and a few jets circling overhead now and then to scare the sheep keep up appearances would have rounded things out quite well.  Leaders could have flown into Hamburg and been whisked away to the island in a gold-plated helicopter for less money.

But this option would have made just too much sense.  Besides, the islands are in the former West Germany, which already has enough money sloshing about.  Better to keep pouring it into the black hole which is the former East.

And the fact the G8 summit will be held in the same constituency as our Chancellor Angela Merkel is, I’m quite sure, pure coincidence and had nothing at all to do with the decision.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Must cut off electricity to help save the planet, so I guess this is the last post. See ya, it’s been fun.

Just a short follow-up to the post below concerning the wasteful weekend ways of some so-called nature-loving Brits.   One of the links leads to a short ecological impact test.  My results were a shocker, because I’d always considered my lifestyle to be pretty sound, ecologically speaking anyway.

I try to buy local, ride my bike everywhere throughout the year in all types of weather, recycle as much as possible, fly maybe only once or twice a year, am sort of semi-vegetarian, ie: eat meat when I feel like it but certainly not every day, and STILL I came out with a rating which shows that if everyone in the world lived as I do, we’d need 2.5 planets just to support this lifestyle.

So I checked out the site again and tried to see what I would have to do in order to bring it down to just one planet.  So putting in things I can’t change - age, home city, alcohol intake gender, size of family and type of residence, I started to tweak the other settings.

But even pretending to be a strict vegan who never eats processed food, produces much less waste than his neighbours, never flies, never travels by car or public transport but only on foot,  bicycle or bullock, I’m still at 1.4 planets.  Time for desperate measures.

Moving into an apartment half the size of the one we’re in now would bring it down to 1.1 planets, but that’s still not good enough.

So apparently the only thing left is to do all of the above, but cut off the electricity.   This is how billions breathing the same air as us will live out their lives, but still…

Any advice on how to sell the idea to my wife and daughter greatly appreciated.

© 2007 lettershometoyou