etnobofin

This video (found via Jean François at Jazz Frisson) actually made me cry, it’s so good. The Count Basie Orchestra provide a lesson in ensemble articulation, and the opening trumpet solo by Thad Jones is electrifying.

When I planned my move to France, I partially imagined that I’d have French friends, and that we’d speak in French all the time: erudite conversations about new-wave cinema in late-night cafés and jokes about Sarkozy amidst Gauloise smoke. The reality so far has actually been more interesting, and introduced the dilemmas of being a “foreigner” in a strange land.

Thursday night tango at Place Saint-Anne, Montpellier

So far, all my friends in France speak English. Which is not to say we all speak English together often. But it is something we all have in common. My friends fall into three broad categories:

• British and American expats (they are unavoidable, and the ones I’ve met aren’t annoying)
• French citizens who are bilingual from birth (ie. they had an anglophone parent)
• French citizens who learnt English as a second language and may have spent time in anglophone countries

Conversations with all these people often take place in French, but sometimes we switch between English and French mid-stream, depending on the subject matter and whether we think one or the other language can express an idea (or tell a joke) better.

Context plays a role: for instance, it’s ridiculous to speak to my American or British friends in French, but if a francophone friend walks into the room, we’ll switch to French so we don’t seem like we’re rudely talking in a foreign language behind their back.

Abandoned shopfront, Montpellier

I’m coming to the conclusion that my relationships in this country will always pivot around the unavoidable fact that I am a foreigner, and an anglo-saxon to boot. Perhaps this is why my friends here all speak English – at some level they all relate to the challenge of sitting inside and outside a culture at the same time.

The nature of being a foreigner does not make friendships less genuine or more distant here. It’s just a question of becoming comfortable with your role as an intermediary between two languages and cultures. Given my accent and life experience, it’s impossible to be accepted as a French person, so it’s not worth trying. But in the end, I didn’t move to France to become French.

Maybe life in France is a bit like finding oneself in an ocean – swimming in French but breathing in English. Both languages are necessary to make progress and to stay afloat.

The mouth of the Hérault river at Grau d’Agde

Today I set out to write an intelligent and interesting post for the blog, but then saw this video (via Miss Expatria), and realised that anything I wrote could never compete with Capucine and her “popotamus that is allergic to magic”.

Not only is the story charming, but I’m simply jealous of the way someone her age gracefully dances through the pluperfect reflexive verbs (“ils s’étaient perdus”) and the literary narrative past tense (“il décida”). These are aspects of grammar I struggled with well into university years.  Oh, to be a native speaker!

Florida as a whole doesn’t hold a lot of appeal for me: a vast flat strip-mall full of beaches, theme parks, swamps and cops in pastel polo shirts driving Ferraris. But there is one place amidst this general tawdriness that geniuinely impressed and inspired: Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

A Saturn V is immodest in size, brutally functional in its design and arrogant in intent. Seen up close at KSC, it’s a completely wonderful machine, the engineering backbone of the single most impressive technical feat in the history of our species.

Here’s me standing next to one of the Rocketdyne F-1 first stage motors. A Saturn V had FIVE of these puppies, each one of them developing more thrust than an entire space shuttle:

On the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, there’s been debate about whether humans should go back to the Moon, or further. A counter-argument often used is that manned spaceflight is a waste of money, and that we should be focusing our attention, resources and energy on solving problems on Earth first.

Such reasoning is flawed. The opportunity cost of not going back to the Moon or to Mars is NOT prolonged starvation, war or global warming. Cancelling the $100 billion ISS would never result in that $100 billion being spent instead on AIDS research or education in African countries.  And aerospace engineers wouldn’t suddenly turn their enthusiasms towards creating new forms of clean energy.

But there is a pot of money and a set of expertise that could profitably be turned to space exploration: defense spending. 

A 20% cut in the US defence budget ($515 billion in 2009) would fund current NASA activities ($18.7 billion) six times over.  And most of the contractors who might lose business through defence cuts (firms like Lockheed, Boeing and BAE) would be exactly the firms with the technology and skills to bid for work in an expanded space programme.

This is not just an American effort, however. The same level defence cuts applied across Europe, Japan, Russia and China, and the subsequent redeployment of brain power and manpower could be transformative for the world economy.

By rights, a space programme should be a politician’s wet dream. High-value jobs. New technologies. Adding to the knowledge economy. And it’s not just jobs for scientists and pilots…there’s thousands of factory floor jobs involved in stitching spacesuits and running wiring through space capsules. The French for fiscal stimulus package is “plan de relance“. Relance – re-launch.

Like Robyn Gallagher, I’d love to see men and women walk on the Moon or Mars during my lifetime. A Mars programme will certainly have to be an international project. The Americans did it on their own with a Saturn V, some chewing gum and a pocket calculator in 1969. In the 21st century it’ll be even better, because we’ll all be along for the ride. To infinity and beyond!

Apollo 17 photos from NASA / Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

Here’s a little story about why Twitter is great. It all happened over the weekend during our round trip from Montpellier to Antibes for the Keith Jarrett gig (the gig was fantastic, I’ve already posted about that below.)

After the gig, we left Antibes around midnight, and headed back onto the autoroute. As the lights of the city faded, Régine, who was driving, said to me “our headlights aren’t working properly.” And indeed, they weren’t – the sidelights were fine, high-beam was OK, but switching to low-beam plunged the road ahead into a disconcerting blackness.

(Image: Lezarderose)

Within a kilometre we saw an aire de repos with a Total station. So we pulled in, grabbed a coffee and a sandwich, and set about trying to fix the headlights. It seemed unlikely to be a bulb problem – both low-beam bulbs failing at the same time was just improbable. The most likely scenario was a blown fuse.

Régine, smart lady, had a set of spare fuses in the glovebox, and although I barely class myself as mechanically literate, I do know how to change car fuses (too many years driving second-hand Toyotas in NZ, where the engines last forever, but the electrics – mirrors, aircon, stereo – are well dodgy).  So far, so good.

But we couldn’t find the fusebox. The Skoda designers had hidden it well. We emptied the car looking for it. Behind the glovebox. Under the dashboard. In the door cavities. We even looked in the spare wheel compartment and under the bonnet. No joy. We had no maintenance manual, and the guys at the service station had no idea either.

Not wanting to be stuck at a service station outside Cannes until sunrise, I turned to technology. Figuring that at least a few of my Twitter followers somewhere in the world would be online, I tweeted via text:

Within five minutes a reply came back:

Now THAT‘s why Twitter is cool. Of course, if I’d had a phone with internet access, I could have done a web search myself, but in the absence of that, a text and a network of Twitter followers worked just as effectively.

On reflection, the real benefit of Twitter in this instance is not the technology itself, it’s the type of user it attracts: high-frequency internet mavens. I knew when I texted my request that somebody among my followers, somewhere in the world, would be online and would do the internet search for me.  That wouldn’t happen with my Facebook friends (sorry guys).

So, thanks to Twitter and @paulie in England, @etnobofin (standing on the side of a motorway in Southern France) was able to find the hidden panel on the side of the dashboard of a Skoda Fabia, lever it off and expose the fusebox. Within fifteen minutes we’d replaced the fuses, got the headlights working again, and were on the road back to Montpellier.

I love living in this century.

Last night was as the French would say, un moment fort. A strong moment – hearing Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack deJohnette play together under the pines at Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d’Azur. It was a 6 hour round-trip from Montpellier, (of which more in a separate post), and worth every minute. Here’s a long post about it.

The Keith Jarrett Trio‘s been together for 26 years, and has played Juan-les-Pins for for ten consecutive years. You’d forgive the guys if they treated their annual French appearance as a cushy retirement gig. But on the basis of what I heard in July 18th, 2009, these greying musicians are really, really still on the top of their game.

The setting at Juan is extravagantly romantic: an open-air stage with the Mediterranean as the backdrop, the audience gathered under stone pines as cicadas chirp into the evening and the hills behind Cannes fade to purple.

But this is France, and nothing is totally perfect. In my section, the arrival of the trio onstage was spoiled by a brief, sharp argument between a man and a woman as to whether she was allowed to smoke during the concert. But the crowd settled and Jarrett’s opening cantata eventually threaded into On Green Dolphin Street.

The first few numbers were stretching exercises, three musicians slowly reconnecting. Critical mass was acheived three songs in, as they teased Johnny Mercer’s I Thought About You to a slow-burning climax. Keith’s phrasing on the second four of the head (the “I thought about you” lyric) was witty, held back an extra millisecond just like Miles used to do in the 60s. The guys were smiling – you could tell they were enjoying themselves, and this song was possibly the musical highlight of the evening.

Seeing these musicians on stage somehow makes you hear new and different aspects of their music. In the flesh, Keith Jarrett’s debt to Ahmad Jamal and Bud Powell is more blatantly obvious than on the ECM albums.

These days, Gary Peacock looks for all the world like a gangly grandfather from Florida, in sweatpants. On record he sounds fluid, almost ethereal, and yet live on stage his phrases are as metrical as a Bach fugue.

Heard live, you realise Jack deJohnette is not a kit drummer – he’s a guy whose central business is, simply, to play his snare drum. The other items on stage with him are placed there to make Jack’s snare drum sound even better.

The second half was full of references to the Trio’s past, including Clifford Brown’s Sandu – recorded on the Trio’s 1999 Paris album. It started at medium-up, propelled by Jarrett’s rollicking blues chops, before Gary and Jack curbed Keith’s enthusiasm and pulled it back to a stately hard-swinging medium: proof that even masters can disagree on tempo, and they can make flawless mid-course corrections.

Later on, a balladic outro melded into a 10-minute long ostinato groove, like a gamelan cycle on a single chord. Jarrett’s insistent pentatonic runs recalled the best of his Köln Concert-era solo work. It seemed clear that this passage of play was a completely unplanned part of the concert, and the grins on stage confirmed it.

After a cleverly-disguised version of Round Midnight (Monk’s music always appears in the Trio’s concerts, noblesse oblige), the show was over. But the crowd was having none of it, calling the group back for THREE (count’em) encores.

First up, Butch and Butch was a twisty bebop showpiece for Jack’s drumming. More standing ovations brought the guys back for When I Fall in Love (sort of the Trio’s theme song), and it seemed that the tender ballad was meant to lull the audience into heading home quietly while contemplating the play of lights on the waterfront.

But the crowd wasn’t leaving. Keith, Gary and Jack re-emerged and re-ignited the stage with a long, gospel funk version of God Bless this Child. Everything came together. The swaying groove revived the ghosts of Jarrett’s 1970′s American Quartet with Gary digging deep into the pocket. Jack’s snare and hi-hat summoned memories of the lines he laid down exactly 40 years ago on Bitches Brew, just a couple of weeks after Aldrin and Armstrong came back to Earth.

If this wasn’t the best concert I’ve ever heard, it was close. For these musicians, age does not seem to weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun on the Mediterranean coast, even the cicadas in the pine trees shut up and listen.

(Musician images taken at soundcheck at Juan-Les-Pins in 2008 by Guillaume Laurent. Creative Commons license.)

I’ve never been unemployed before.  Although officially I’m still a student until the end of September, the necessity of finding an income meant my job search started a couple of months ago, and so far it’s proving to be more bone-jarring than I ever anticipated.

Until this year, I never really considered that my self-esteem was wrapped up in employment. My career was something interesting to do while I travelled, played music, mused on human affairs and generally tried to make my way in the world.  But now, the reality of NOT having an income is hitting home. I’m budgeted through to the end of December, but just in case, I’ve checked what social welfare I might be eligible for. And what dishwashing jobs are available. It’s a Plan B I don’t relish.

Should I start my own business?  Entrepreneurship is the sexy thing to do. But going freelance or starting something from scratch requires a certain kind of desire in your bones. Cajones. Extraverted enthusiasm. My drive lies elsewhere. I am an team player, happy to lend my apparent INTJ energy to someone else’s project rather than building one all on my own.

Job applications are soul-wrenching things.  Scour the ads for something that fits your profile. Find a posting that really, REALLY excites you, like uncovering a diamond in the slag heap. Spend half an hour reading up about the company. Another hour or two spent tuning-up your CV, writing your application letter (in French and sometimes in English), and launch it into the mysterious black vastness of a review process.

Rejection letters are full of robotic euphemism: “We read your CV with interest. Although it does not correspond to our current requirements, we will keep your CV on file for future reference.” Hours of enthusiasm and effort rebuffed by an auto-reply. Never any word on what was missing, or what the successful candidates had that you didn’t.

You ask yourself: “What am I not doing right? Am I losing out to Harvard and INSEAD grads? Am I looking in the wrong place? Or did I make a spelling mistake in my CV?“  Sometimes, a job offer becomes such an abstract concept  it’s not worth contemplating. You wish simply to get a phone call. An interview. Some acknowledgement that someone, somewhere, may actually be interested in your skills and experience.

It’s hard work. Some days you’re inspired and confident. Other times, you rail against the world. If someone like me can’t find employment – with 8 years experience, of which 5 years in management positions, an international career profile, a bilingual MBA – what chance do new graduates have? Or that bloke recently released from prison? Or the forty-something solo mother returning to the workforce?

The economic crisis does not make the task easier, but I try to not make it an excuse. The week I stopped work, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world economy finally saw the iceberg towards which it had been steaming for decades. The crisis is an external factor for which I couldn’t plan.

So I can’t complain. I know I am lucky just to have this opportunity. The situation is of my own making. Having saved up a not-inconsiderable sum of money, I resigned my position last year to do a full-time degree, investing time and cash in a venture that I gauged would accelerate my career and open up a new country to me. But the sheer scale of the challenge is energy-sapping.

Looking for a job in France is an adventure, my own personal moonshot. Stepping outside the warm familiar spaceship, one small step for a man and all that. At certain moments, the mission is exciting and energising, but it doesn’t make it any less scary.

(Images: NASA/Apollo Lunar Surface Journal)

Thought this was worth posting… the video for SJD/Sean Donnelly‘s new single Baby You’re Oh So. A really nice concept, which takes me back to my earliest computer experiences on the neighbour’s Apple IIe in about 1984.

(Hat tip – video found via Andrew Dubber’s tweet.)

Nice to see Sean working with Chris O’Connor on drums these days. I’ve worked with both Tom Atkinson (Sean’s previous drummer) and Chris, both excellent musicians. Among various improv and jazz projects, Chris also plays with Don McGlashan, and probably will lend a more organic sound to Sean’s live set.

Here’s my photo of Chris at the beach in New Zealand a few years back.

Tuesday was the 14th of July – Bastille Day, but nobody calls it that here. It’s just “le quartorze juillet” or “La Fête Nationale“.  Some friends and I decided to mark the occasion by going out to the Domaine de Grammont for the pique-nique républicaine and the 11pm fireworks.

Grammont is on the outskirts of the city, slightly beyond the reach of trams and regular buses, so the municipalité laid on free shuttle buses to take the crowds out to the Domaine. So far, so good.

The picnic was fun, we sat in the grounds of the château, munching on sandwiches and learning about life in Dublin and Omaha, Nebraska. And the 30 minutes of fireworks (with musical accompaniment) was easily the best display I’ve ever seen. Sometimes, France manages to do things exactly right, and this was one of those moments.

The great disappointment of the evening was the organisation of the return transport – with tens of thousands of people trying to get back into town after the display, there was a bottleneck involving too few buses, large numbers of increasingly frustrated citizens and an absence of any apparent control or organisation. It was, to use a colourful Nebraskan metaphor, “a total clusterf*ck“.

The motorcycle police seemed to be there simply to keep the scene clear of private cars to allow the buses, the bus drivers and the general public to have a big argument with one another.  With no crowd barriers, lots of young children, alcohol-fuelled anger and dozens of slow-moving buses, the potential for either violence or a serious accident was very real.

In the end, we gave up on the buses and the restless peasantry and walked 10 minutes back to the tram at Odysseum. Ironic (or perhaps appropriate?) that a festival designed to celebrate national unity, and those great valeurs républicaines of fraternité, égalité and liberté should culminate in a display of méprise, colère and bordel.

Spectacular and beautiful state-funded largesse, followed immediately by organisational chaos,  small-minded arguments between citizens and a near-riot.   I continue to fall in love with this country more and more.

Canadians have hockey, Americans have little league, New Zealanders have barefoot beach rugby, the English have rainy weekends in Brighton.  But if you want to evoke the sun-kissed childhood of a French person from the south, just mention toro-piscine.

La toro-piscine was a summer amusement for kids in southern France long before skateboarding and the roller coaster, and seems to remain today a distinctive and well-loved part the culture of the region.

From the Camargue westwards, bull sports are popular across the south. Most towns and many villages have their own purpose-built arènes. There’s la corrida (real bulls and real death), la course camarguaise, (real bulls but no death) various runnings of the bulls, and la toro-piscine (young cows, silly games and prizes for the kids).

Last night I went to the toro-piscine at Palavas with my landlady and her cousins from northern Alsace, who like me had never been to a bullring before. Palavas is a beachside town near Montpellier, with funfairs, cheesy souvenir shops and an overpriced revolving restaurants in a tower – a little like Blackpool, but with sunshine.  And, like most southern resort towns, Palavas runs bulls during the summer season.

Cows (les vachettes) and the game equipment are provided by the arena, but the competitors are volunteers from the crowd, who play individually in teams for prizes. In the centre of the arena is a pool, (hence piscine), and one of the classic games involves coaxing the vachette to chase you across the pool. There is real danger, real tension and real laughs.

At the end of the evening, a bull, wearing a bell around his neck is trotted out to “collect” his vachette. Sometimes the vachette is eager to depart the ring, and sometimes she’s reluctant – as if she’s had too much fun with her human friends to bother with her boyfriend.

Here’s a 2-minute highlights reel: