The Mad Clockfixers of Paris

  • Pretty off-topic, but I thought it was funny.

    Via the Lon­don Times online: Paris is under attack by extremely well-organized stealth oper­a­tives who have been sneak­ing into muse­ums and Parisian cat­a­combs and … clean­ing up his­toric sites. Or repair­ing things. Or hold­ing poetry readings.

    Mr Kun­st­mann belongs to les UX, a clan­des­tine net­work that is on a mis­sion to dis­cover and exploit [Paris]’s neglected under­world. The urban explor­ers put on film shows in under­ground gal­leries, restore medieval crypts and break into mon­u­ments after dark to organ­ise plays and read­ings. In the eyes of their sup­port­ers, they are the white knights of mod­ern cul­ture, ren­o­vat­ing for­got­ten build­ings and stag­ing artis­tic events beyond the reach of a sti­fling civil service.

    The author­i­ties view them dif­fer­ently: as the dark side of the City of Light – irre­spon­si­ble, para­noid sub­ver­sives whose actions could serve as a model for ter­ror­ists. A police unit has been trained to track les UX through the sew­ers, cat­a­combs and old quar­ries that are their path­ways under Paris. Pros­e­cu­tors have been instructed to file charges when­ever feasible.

    The stand-off is sym­bolic of French soci­ety: a rig­or­ous bureau­cracy on the sur­face with a bizarre sub­cul­ture below.

    We’ve all got­ten so used to berat­ing the French for their haugh­ti­ness or lack of pluck in wartime that we some­times for­get another of their foibles: they love bureau­cracy for the sake of bureau­cracy. It’s just too funny that the city that prides itself on its his­tory and cul­ture reduces its culture-lovers to crawl­ing through sew­ers and skank­ing around in cat­a­combs in order to pre­vent his­toric sites and arti­facts from crum­bling from neglect.

    And what are these “ter­ror­ists” up to with all their skulk­ing around? Well, some­times they fix clocks.

    Last year the Unter­gun­ther spent months hid­den in the Pan­théon, the Parisian mau­soleum that holds France’s great­est cit­i­zens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slip­ping in at clos­ing time every evening – French tele­vi­sion said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a work­shop hid­den behind mock wooden crates at the top of the mon­u­ment. The secu­rity guards never found it. The Unter­gun­ther used a pro­fes­sional clock­maker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.

    When the clock began work­ing again, offi­cials were hor­ri­fied. The Cen­tre for National Mon­u­ments con­firmed that the clock had been repaired but said that the author­ity had begun legal action against the Unter­gun­ther. Under offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tion for break­ing and entry, its mem­bers face a max­i­mum sen­tence of one year in prison and a €15,000 (£10,500) fine.

    “We could go down in legal his­tory as the first peo­ple ever to be pros­e­cuted for repair­ing a clock,” said Mr Kun­st­mann. But he was unrepentant.

    Glad the gov­ern­ment is crack­ing down on these guys. They’re obvi­ously psychopaths.


    Related posts:

    1. Paris
    2. Mean­while, back in France …
    3. No gay mar­riage in gay Paree
    4. Imus-ta gone mad
    5. When no one was look­ing, Cindy Shee­han went com­pletely mad

    October 4th, 2007 | Grace | No Comments |

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