Monday, November 19, 2007

saint pancreas internationale - critique

so i've now arrived in st pancras international from paris 1ce and departed 1ce - and though the station is (imho) a marvel comic to behold, the arrantements are not as good as waterloo or gare du nord for travellers in 2 regards

1. where do i put my bike in st pancras, eh? this has already been protested about but it is a joke to have 22 bad ground level weedy bike loops for a really big station...

2. there's 1 cafe 1ce you go thru registeration/passport and it has 2 people serving AND they wont let you bring coffee in from outside (thats new!)

for a 7.30am train, this leads to a MASSIVE queue, which is ludicrous...where's the "retail experience" in that then, eh

so 11/10 for architecture, but 3/10 for green, human facing stuff...

coming from paris, where there is velib, this is a bit annoying - see
geo. coulouris report on the joys of the system, even during a metro strike....

hmm - so i take some of it back - in just a few days, they have put a BUNCH of bike racks in the eurostar car park - much better than the adjancent King's Cross ones, and the cafe situation seems a tad better - well done!! very fast improvement AND the train has been early (just over 2 hours and 5 minutes, TWICE!)....impressive - indeed, it has been late by 5-7 minutes twice, but due to delays on the french (shared track) side

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Rashomon 2.0

so (and I am sure kurosawa though of this anyhow) one thing one could do in a Rashomon re-make in a post-modern era is to have the same person tell ALL the stories (after all the film is a fiction, and there is only reall the narrator and the audidence) but the story would change depending on the audience

this is a bit like human memory and behaviour - each time you "recall" something ,actually, you re-tell the story a slightly different way- but imagine its a story (memory) that matters a lot to you - you will certainly recall and retell it differently to your lover, mother, father, daughter, son, policeman, lawyer, doctor, judge, teacher ...etc etc

that would be a fun story to write (and maybe to read, a few times) a few times

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

shut the haburger joint or the smiley dame gets it

walkin round the louvre this weekend with my 10 yr old, we concocted this plan
to kidnap the Mona Lisa and hold it to ransome - the fee - france has to close
ALL the McDonalds branches, or we will cover La Jaconde with "special sauce"

no, really....oh, ok, not...