etnobofin

A few not-quite connected thoughts, after which I can resume normal transmission.

1. Two words: Quincy Jones. Sure, Michael Jackson had a great voice, could dance a hell of a lot, and for a time in the 70s and 80s he had all the ambition in the world. But he only made 3 great records – Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad, and the common denominator in all of them was Quincy Jones in the producer’s chair. Nothing Jackson released after Bad was worthy of the legacy created by these 3 albums.

Beyond Jackson’s remarkable voice, all the best musical moments in his catalogue are Quincy Jones moments: the crystal-clear orchestration of Rock With You, the synth stabs that announce the arrival of Thriller, and the classic soundscape of Billie Jean (undisputably Jackson’s most perfect song).

2. My generation essentially can’t remember a time before Thriller. Alongside fighting with lightsabres, dancing to Michael Jackson is something we’ve been doing since we were in nappies. Bubbles the chimpanzee was the common currency of  playground chatter, and when we danced to Beat It in my kindergarten girlfriend’s lounge (dodging scattered Lego blocks), we discovered for the first time that if we danced hard enough, we could make the needle jump off the LP turntable.

3. I was about 10 years old when Moonwalker came out. I can’t remember if I saw it in the cinema or not. But during a wet holiday with my grandparents in Taupo, we hired it on VHS. The Smooth Criminal dance sequence completely blew my tiny mind.

And even during my most annoying teenage jazz-fundamentalist phase, when good Michael Jackson albums were a phenomenon of a previous decade, there was still a part of me that thrilled to that singer who could tip his fedora forward and moonwalk across any stage he cared to.

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. 

Sunday night was the summer solstice, and France celebrated the Fête de la Musique. Basically, nearly every hamlet, village, town and city is turned into a giant venue for multiple free concerts and spontaneous jam sessions for the entire evening. In Montpellier, part of the tram network is shut down so stray trombonists or dreadlocked djembe-players don’t get run over, and several hundred thousand people pour into the centre of town to wander, drink, dance and listen (roughly in that order of priority).

All in all, it’s rather less about the musique, and more about the fête.

Like most nationally-celebrated events in France, the Fête de la Musique is a central government initiative, launched by Jack Lang, François Mitterand’s Minister of Culture in 1982. Several French friends told me rather proudly that the concept has been “exported” to many other countries, however no other country can rival the enthusiasm and napoleonic ubiquity witnessed in France every June 21st.

The atmosphere in Montpellier was amicable chaos, and the quality of the music varied from determinedly-average to actually-pretty-darn-good. I was disappointed by the number of covers bands, and lack of original local music: it seemed madness that a magnificent outdoor setting like la Promenade de Peyrou should be given over to an Air Guitar contest (mais oui) and musical tributes to Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana. Music fans had to search elsewhere for gems.

Down on the Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, a Devo tribute band was competently belting out disco-rock to a disinterested early-evening crowd. FauxDevo were so loud I almost walked straight past the Stick Jazz Trio without noticing. Set up among the tables outside Chez Boris, the SJT is based around Jean-Jacques Koto Bekima’s 10-string “stick” guitar, an instrument that allows bass and solo guitar lines to be played simultaneously.

They played great, opting for the sort of intricate modal bop that suits guitar-led groups. Saxophonist Sebastian Debloos trades in a nice Lovano/Brecker tenor style, the hallmark of jazz school graduates. But SJT was energetic, intelligent and held a decent crowd despite competition from the nearby stages.

When I got down to the Opera House on the Comédie, a local batucada group were finishing off a wandering samba session through the old town. They weren’t that great: I’ve heard better batucada in New Zealand – this particular group just weren’t tight or particularly swinguant.

Fellow Montpellierain jcverdie filmed their progress through town (see above). The video is less interesting for the music than for the impression it gives of the streets and architecture of the Ecusson for those who haven’t visited Montpellier before. [Edit: the video above apparently is not Onda Maracatu. You can watch Onda Maracatu here.]

Montpellier’s not a big city. It seemed inevitable that I’d bump into a friend among the crowds. On rue St Guilhem I got pulled aside by Dany, who was insistent: “Richard, tu viengs boire un pot avec nous?” (Dany is from Sète, and is the most typically southern Frenchman I’ve met – chauvinist, eternally tanned and incredibly friendly).

From then on the proceedings evolved into a rather typical Montpellier evening out:  I met more people from Brittany (I swear 80% of the inhabitants of Montpellier are Breton), we went to a taverna owned by one of Dany’s friends for tapas and sangria (80% of Montpellierains have a friend who runs a taverna), and my French improved after a few drinks.

A little flamenco performance in an alleyway drew our attention for a few minutes. Some of my friends from the CRS swaggered past. The officers seemed determinedly unmoved by the music going on around them. “Ah, mais les flics, tu sais, ils dansent à l’intérieur“, whispered Dany. The cops, he assured me, were dancing on the inside.

Dany had to drive back to Sète, so I slowly made my way back to the tram, past some music school students jamming to Canteloupe Island (mais oui) on rue de Candolle, and an enthusiastic set of nouveau-swing by Le Comptoir des Fous at Place Albert 1er. Finally, I’d found a band singing in French! And singing French songs !

As Francis Cabrel describes it, “La nuit a été chaude en alcools…“. The crowd in the square were well-oiled by this stage, swigging 2 Euro rosé straight from the bottle, and homeless people were dancing in front of the stage with their dogs. Even if the cops weren’t smiling, everyone seemed pretty darn happy. It was, after all, la fête, quoi.

Yesterday, I went to see the police. Nothing serious, I just lost my British Passport (a silly story not worth retelling here), so I needed to get a police report. All of those schoolboy phrases, starting with “Où-est le commissariat de police, s’il vous plaît?” suddenly seemed startlingly relevant for the first time in my life. My third form teacher would be proud…

But nothing in France is simple, especially getting a police report. As Ed mentioned recently, France bathes in a marasma of overlapping and mutually ignorant layers of public service. The police services (plural, for there are at least 3) no exception.

After consulting the British consular website, it seemed that I needed to get the report from the Police Nationale. So I duly trammed into town and trotted into the Commissariat de Police on Place de la Comédie, a prefabricated-toilet-looking building with violently slamming doors that skulks behind the Office de Tourisme.

Not the Montpellier Police Station. (Image: franck_h20)

I explained my situation to the junior officer on the front desk: I’d lost my passport and needed to make a déclaration de perte. The officer seemed slightly perturbed that I wanted to talk to him about a document that wasn’t issued by the French authorities. “You must talk to your consulate, monsieur. It is a British passport, not a French passport.“

I explained again that I’d already talked to the consulate, and they said I needed to make a déclaration with the local police. However he insisted again that his station couldn’t help me, and I needed to make the déclaration at the Préfecture (which is the local office of the French national government, nothing to do with the police).

A little bit doubtful, I headed back across Place de la Comédie (a furnace in the mid-June sun) and up to the Préfecture. The lady at the reception desk was confused with my request, but her colleague seemed confident that they could help. He took great delight in adressing me in barely comprehensible lycée-level English, (although I told him we could speak in French) telling me to “ka-nock” on the door of the Office for EU citizens, and they would sort me out.

I ka-nocked on the door of the Office for EU Citizens, and eventually a rather informed-looking lady emerged. She was appalled that the police officer had told me to come and see her, and said it was a police matter, and she couldn’t help me. She suggested that if the police nationale couldn’t do anything, I should try the police municipale (the local city cops who essentially handle noise complaints, hand out parking tickets and look enviously at the “real” police and the Gendarmerie who get cool guns).

“Je suis jaloux, moi” (Image: StreetFly JZ)

The Police Municipale is a short walk from the Préfecture, and when I arrived, the bloke behind the desk (resplendent in shorts, flip-flops and a polo shirt) told me in no uncertain terms that they were not the autorité compétente for a déclaration de perte, and I should address my query to the Police Nationale. With a sigh, I thanked him for his help, and headed back out into the afternoon heat, back down the hill to the Commissariat de Police.

Back in the public-toilet architected Commissariat with the slammy doors, Mr Junior Desk Officer was not pleased to see me back, but he was polite. This time there was another colleague with him, with a couple more stripes on his epaulettes, who also thought that a déclaration de perte was not his job, but he had enough training to go and fetch a sergeant, who indicated, finally, that yes, a déclaration de perte could be lodged at the Commissariat. So they entered my details in a computer and told me to wait for the next available duty officer.

While I waited in the police reception, a trio of CRS officers strolled in. The CRS are part of the Police Nationale, but their main job is to quell riots and make the regular police officers jealous, because they carry enough impressive clobber around their waists to start World War III.

The CRS are evidently taught a particular way of walking at CRS-school: a kind of slow-motion Robocop swagger with a dash of professional wrestler. The CRS walk says “I could break your legs just by staring at them”. They also wear dark blue one-piece boiler-suits, possibly designed for easy laundering after a day spent thigh-deep in blood and tear gas.

Not quite like the CRS dudes I met in the police station

Finally I was called through to the interview room, where my statement was taken by an efficient lady officer whose official image was somewhat spoiled by the pink Hello Kitty watch on her wrist.She’s probably incredibly bored with stupid foreign residents losing passports and permis de séjour, but didn’t show it. The whole process took about five minutes, and I thanked her and walked out the door with a precious signed and stamped déclaration.

So, all in all, a rather a typical experience of French bureaucracy – three agencies who didn’t know what the other did, resulting in one big hot, sweaty circle back to where I started.  It didn’t bother me too much, I’m developing a good argumentative pose which helps in getting results in this country. But I have a lot of spare time and speak reasonably functional French. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be if you were a foreign tourist in a rush…

Result!

In Oxford last week, I spent time browsing second-hand books on the third floor of Blackwells. The rest of the store is slick and modern, but the top level of Blackwells, with views onto the quads of Trinity College, has a creaky wooden floor and that hint of dust and mildew that makes it somehow an isolated eyrie of an older Oxonian age.

Lapwings Over Merton Field – Chiang Yee

One book immediately caught my eye – a 1946 edition of The Silent Traveller in Oxford. It was written by the Chinese artist and author Chiang Yee in 1942 while he was living in Oxford, after his flat in the East End of London was destroyed in the Blitz. As a registered “alien”, Chiang Yee couldn’t leave Britain in wartime, and so took rooms in Southmoor Road in Jericho.

First published in 1944, Chiang Yee’s account of 1940s Oxford is particularly interesting for me. My father was born in Oxford during the war: my grandparents worked for the Food Ministry, and had their London offices relocated to Oxford, out of harms way. So thanks to Goering’s bombers, Dad was born an Oxonian.

(Oxford was not targeted by the Luftwaffe during WW2 for a number of possibly apocryphal reasons. The one I like best recounts that many high-ranking Luftwaffe officers were German aristocrats who had studied at Oxford and could not bear the idea of bombs raining down on the Turf Tavern.)

From a Railway Bridge Near Lake Street – Chiang Yee

Chiang Yee was (a little like me) an accidental expatriate in Oxford. The “foreign-ness” of his eye is reflected in his colour plates and ink sketches that accompany the text. The landmarks and characters are all in place, but somehow Chiang’s Chinese art transforms familiar views of the city into something more ancient and timeless.

The blackout curtains and ration-books are gone, but today’s Oxford seems little different to the city described by Chiang Yee 65 years ago . In the 21st Century, peacocks still strut on the roof of the Trout Inn, crowds still line Magdalen Bridge on May Morning, and the 8.05 “down train” to Paddington is still full of be-suited commuters and the occasional tweedy academic departing for an errand in London.

Despite the hardship and tension of the period, Chiang’s Oxford is a harbour of peace and reflection. The war is barely mentioned – the undergraduate population is depleted by conscription, a bomber wheels lazily over Port Meadow, and the Cockney accents of Blitz evacuees mix with shopkeepers’ Oxfordshire burr on Cornmarket. But Chiang’s attention is drawn more to the landscape, nature and cityscape.

Chiang’s eye for detail and contemplation is quite disarming. His writing captures perfectly the shift of seasons against the colleges’ grey stone. Several paragraphs are spent describing the facial expressions of a duck and the delicate dance of crocuses in the wind. Verses from Li P’o, Longfellow and Shelley enter his consciousness while wandering up the banks of the Isis towards The Perch.

Peacocks at Trout Inn – Chiang Yee

I have read many excellent books about Oxford (Jan Morris’ Oxford is still the essential primer). But Chiang Yee’s is definitely the most charming: it’s available in a 2003 reprint, but I think the 1940s Methuen  editions (“printed in complete confirmity with the authorized economy standards” as stated the frontispiece) are quite hard to come by now. This was a lucky find!

Alan Wilkis – Snuggle Up to Nail Down
From Pink and Purple EP [Buy] [CD Baby]

Last year we reviewed Alan Wilkis‘ slightly eccentric début album Babies Dream Big, and adored its big-tent mix of pop stylings. In 2009 the Brooklyn-based musician and producer is back with an EP entitled Pink and Purple, a deep dive into the synthesised swamp of Reagan-era soundscapes and electrolysed beats.

Wilkis always sounds like he’s having a great amount of fun, whether its dressing up as Rick James backed by the Nintendo Sisters on Snuggle Up to Nail Down (complete with ridiculous-but-appropriate autotuned vocals), or filtering percussion through a DeLorean’s flux capacitor on the EP’s title track.

On N.I.C.E., Wilkis’ white-boy disco fiend is out on the town looking for his material girl, and everything on the scene is pitch-perfect: the swirling synth pads, the rap outro and “Ooh boy, show me whatcha got” female BVs. You could argue that it’s pastiche, but these days, pastiche counts as modernism. And with music as wilfully wrought as this, Wilkis takes it to another level.

Perhaps Wilkis’ choice of 80s schtick sounds a little insincere on the sub-bossa ballad Time Machine, but when Pink and Purple focuses on filling the dancefloor, the EP works very very nicely indeed, and comes across as a more coherent work than his 2008 album. Check it out on Wilkis’ site, or listen on MySpace.

Three things encountered on my walk in town this morning:

A completely honest beggar on rue de la Loge whose sign reads “Juste pour l’alcool et drogue“. I’m pretty sure it’s clever irony, because he’s got a nice-looking guitar and speaks pretty good English.

Two fabulous gendarmes on motorcycles who zoom through the crowds of pedestrians on the mall outside the Polygone shopping centre. One pulls up under the canopy outside the bank, proceeds to put his card in the cash machine and take out some Euros, while his partner keeps guard. Once he’s picked up his lunch money, the cops then zoom off again back through the crowd.

The regular morning cacophony on rue de Candolle, by the cathedral, where you can hear at least five or six instruments practising at once. Today it was cello, vibraphone, clarinet and trombone. The sounds bounce off the walls of the high, narrow streets, giving the impression that you’re walking through an Eric Dolphy album.

Seven days spent back in England was a reminder of everything left behind across the Channel – good friends, bad weather, great pubs and fantastic Indian restaurants. Here are a few highlights:

On our way from the Royal Academy to the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery, my aunt and I bumped into the band of the Welsh Guards toddling up the Mall. For a few minutes, I was a real tourist.

A couple of nights in Birmingham were enough to visit the legendary Punjab Paradise on Ladypool Road and attend my Business School’s ”Summer” Ball at the Botanic Gardens, where the evening was cold enough for the peacocks’ breath to steam.

Oxford remains one of my favourite places in the world. A weekend was happily spent catching up with friends, eating fish, browsing old books at Blackwell‘s and being amazed once again by New College’s choir. The sun emerged long enough on Sunday for a sandwich picnic in the University Parks. It was like being home again.

A final whirlwind day in London, (tapas lunch in Angel, meetings in Old Street and a sneaky visit to the Parthenon Marbles which I had never seen before), was capped off by an unexpected view of sunset over the Upper Pool of the Thames from a pub in Bermondsey. The city looked like it was on fire, and the pints were less than 2 quid.

Thanks to everyone who let me sleep on their couch, and to all the friends who found time to say hello. Sorry I couldn’t see more people – but I’ll be back sometime…

There’s unlikely to be any posts here for the next week – I’m spending 7 days in the UK for some meetings and catching up with friends, mainly in London, Birmingham and Oxford.

I’ve decided to leave my laptop and home, as a bit of an experiment to see if I can run my life from my HTC Diamond (pictured – it’s kind of like the Google Phone, but runs smelly Windows Mobile instead of Android).

I’ll be tweeting, so you can follow me on twitter, if you expect anything profound or amusing might cross my mind during the week.

Take care and see you soon!