etnobofin

Once again, etnobofin is moving cities. In the last 13 months or so, we’ve been living in Oxford, Birmingham and Montpellier. And from the beginning of October, we’re going to be calling a new town home.

I’ve accepted a job offer in Paris. To have found an interesting and challenging job in France during the current crisis is perhaps not a miracle, (hopefully my skills and experience have something to do with it) but it certainly makes me feel fortunate, and just a little proud that I’ve taken the next step along the journey I outlined earlier in the year.

This move should provide a little more permanence than the past twelve months. 2008 and 2009 have been necessarily unsettled (inevitable when you’re doing a international degree across two countries) I’m looking forward to the challenge of settling down for a while in the 5th largest city in the world by GDP.

I’ve followed klari’s blog for years, and a while back a now-defunct Parisian jazz blog called samizdjazz, so I’m excited about being close to a lot of musical happenings of various kinds. And I’m hoping that I can use some of my time in Paris to get back into playing some music.

However, if posting in the next month or so is sporadic, it’s because I’m moving across France, finding an apartment and starting a job. It’s gonna be busy, but it’ll be worth it. Thanks again to everyone who reads the blog, I hope you’ll find the impending Parisian adventures interesting!

Sir Howard Morrison died today. He was one of New Zealand’s most popular entertainers for 50 years, and a man who used his talent and energy to advance the causes of his people.

A humourist,  a musician, a quietly committed activist, he will be remembered for many things, but his performance of Whakaaria mai (How Great Thou Art, sung in Maori) will remain a treasured memory for anyone who heard it live or on television.

[Edit: for a more nuanced and detailed appreciation by a knowledgeable critic, Graham Reid's piece on Public Address is well worth reading]

Kua hinga he Kauri nui i roto i te waonui o Tane. Hoki atu ra ki o tuupuna Matua i Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pamamao.

Leanna (top) and Bethany Mills (Photo: Natalie Grono/Sydney Morning Herald)

Once in a while, life throws unexpected meetings at you, meetings that take you completely outside your normal frame of reference.  I’ve had one of those moments this week. Today, I met Leanna Mills. It happened something like this:

Last night, coming home from dinner on the tram, I was talking with an English friend, (in English of course). A man sitting nearby turns around and looks at us. As my friend got off the tram, he gets up and comes over, and asks, in a strong Australian accent, “So, where’re you from mate?”

He finds out I’m from New Zealand, and I find out Nic’s from Newcastle, New South Wales. And he’s here in Montpellier with his family because his 14 year-old daughter Leanna is having life-saving surgery. For the sixth time.

Leanna and her younger sister Bethany (12) suffer from an extremely rare neurological condition called primary dystonia. There is no cure, and one of the few successful treatments is deep brain stimulation, which involves the implantation of electrodes in the brain. One of the only places in the world they undertake the procedure on children is the paediatric neurosurgery department at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Montpellier.

Nic and his wife Michelle don’t speak a word of French, but since 2005, the lives of two of their daughters are in the hands of a few French expert surgeons. As Nic told me, the Australian government provides part-funding for overseas treatment, but most of the enormous costs of travel, surgery and after-care have been paid for by Nic and his wife’s own fundraising efforts, and the help of a few generous donors.

I wanted to give Nic my contact details, but when we parted ways at our tram stop, I didn’t have a business card on me, and Nic didn’t have a pen. So I shook his hand and wished him well, and walked home. A late-night google search uncovered this article about the girls in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Today, I wrote down my contact details on a piece of paper, and stuck it in an envelope. The plan was to drop it at the reception desk at the hospital, and ask them to give it to Nic. I wasn’t even sure if the hospital staff would allow me to do that, given patient confidentiality rules.

But when I arrived at reception, the lady said “Ah yes, the Australian girl. She’s on the 5th floor in Pediatric Neurosurgery. Take the lift, and go on up.” So I found the ward, asked at the nurses’ station, and I was shown to Leanna’s room. Leanna and Nic were both asleep, but the nurse had no hesitation in waking them up to tell them they had a visitor.

I had originally planned to simply drop off a letter. I ended up staying two and a half hours. Stuck in France, the Mills have had few English-speaking visitors. Nic and I talked about the fundraising efforts, and the adventures and dramas the family have had over the course of ten years. A nurse came in, invited Leanna to a birthday party for one of the other patients, and she disappeared for half an hour in a wheelchair.

It seems a cliché to describe Leanna as a brave young woman. At the age of 14, she’s spent more time in hospital than most people experience in a lifetime. She has electrodes in her brain, a battery pack in her abdomen and wires inside her neck. And yet, one day out of intensive care, she was still smiling. And she insisted on getting my myspace address.

Just as remarkable are Leanna’s parents. Nic has given up his job to care for his daughters and to find ways to raise funds for treatment and care. They both look tired, but determined. Nick’s made a solid list of contacts and has grand plans to put together the financial footing the family will need in the future. There’s a book and a website on the way.

Even if the repeat surgery is succesful, there’s a long way to go – Leanna and Bethany both require ongoing monitoring, and changing the batteries in their brain stimulation devices requires surgery every two years for the rest of their lives. The costs involved are extraordinary – but without this treatment, the girls would die.

Bethany, two years younger, is back in Australia and by all accounts doing very well. The Mills’ youngest daughter Olivia also stayed behind in Newcastle with relatives this time, while the oldest daughter Katey travelled with her parents to spend the summer in Montpellier while Leanna underwent surgery.

Next week, the Mills hope to fly home to Australia. I’m going to try and keep in touch with this remarkable family, and when their website is live, I’ll post the link here. Because you never know who might be able to help.

Boredoms – Ant 10 (DJ Lindstrøm Remix)
From Super Roots 10 : Thrill Jockey 221 [Buy]

Super Roots 10 is the new EP from Japanese rock-noise-art band Boredoms. It’s finally released this month outside Japan, after months of speculation. It’s a freaking cool record, but I’m stumped if I know exactly why.

The music here tracks a noise-ambient-minimalism path chasing some kind of obsessive internal logic requiring overblown guitars, analogue synths, ostinato figures and platoons of manic percussion. The overall effect is like listening to 15,000 WalkMans plugged into a nuclear powerstation. For 40 minutes.

Any band that’s been around for more than 20 years (Boredoms was founded in Osaka 1986 by Yamantaka Eye) has very little left to prove. Boredoms are all about their stage performances, and it really is their extensive use of live percussion that sets them apart from any other band on the planet.

In many ways the 3 remixes and the original track here are extensions of each other: four movements in a greater work that just happen break easily over the two sides of a 12 inch dance single.

And this is definitely dance music, especially designed for dancing while throwing oneself joyfully against brick walls and leaping off bungalow roofs into thornbushes. Super Roots 10 should sound like shit, and yet somehow, it makes complete sense. One of the best releases I’ve heard all year.

Seen in Châtelet metro station today*:

A guy dressed in complete gangster outfit – fluourescent puffer jacket, baggy jeans, baseball cap twisted sideways – with a paperback copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal sticking out of his back pocket.

Respect.

Image: Thomas Claveirole (Creative Commons)

(*Sorry klari, I was in town for just 6 hours for a meeting – not a good time for coffee. Next time, let’s hope!)

14th September 2009 – remember this date. It’s the day that the Stiglitz Commission presented its report on improved GDP measurement to the French government. If the report has the impact that Nicolas Sarkozy hopes, it could eventually change the way politics and economics are done throughout the world.

Joseph Stiglitz arrives at the Sorbonne to deliver his report

The report, which runs to 291 pages in English, 324 pages in French, argues that current methodogy for measuring GDP, and therefore the performance of an economy, is inadequate because it doesn’t measure quality-of-life and ecological impacts.

Essentially, what these economists are saying is that we need to evaluate economies in terms of how they serves their society and environment, rather than measuring the economy purely in terms of the quantity of stuff produced. Changing GDP measurements would shift the goalposts for policy-making: the implications for countries everywhere could be wide-ranging.

The Commission started work in January 2008, before the financial crisis really hit, but the ensuing year of chaos has made its work even more relevant. The Commission argues that a more balanced GDP measurement could have assisted in blunting or preventing global banking collapse of September 2008:

“[Some of the members of the commission believe that] one of the reasons why the crisis took many by surprise is that our measurement system failed us and/or market participants and government officials were not focusing on the right set of statistical indicators. In their view, neither the private nor the public accounting systems were able to deliver an early warning, and did not alert us that the seemingly bright growth performance of the world economy between 2004 and 2007 may have been achieved at the expense of future growth. It is also clear that some of the performance was a “mirage”, profits that were based on prices that had been inflated by a bubble.”
Report of the Commission, Executive Summary pages 8-9

Will anyone pay attention? Will the recommendations be implemented? Perhaps the weight of old habits and vested interest will prevent change. But the timing of the report is masterly – the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse and just days before the G20 meet in Pittsburgh to discuss reform of the world financial system.

So this report will certainly be read and debated. Some will argue that the Commission’s membership was too “French” for the report to be more widely applicable. But as a statement of intent, endorsed by the government of one of world’s largest industrialised economies, the document is powerful in itself.

The Commission was convened at the insistance of Nicolas Sarkozy. Like all French Presidents, he’s a controversial figure – loved by some here in France for his energy and his will to change things, loathed by others for his autocratic style, his hardline stance on immigrants and his “bling bling” lifestyle.

If the findings of his Commission are indeed adopted widely, it could be ironic that Sarkozy, a right-wing president, and professed fan of free markets and liberal economics, could go down in history as the leader who initiated one of the most important advances in social and environmental progress in a century.

Muchas apologias. Writing on the blog has been intermittent lately. The last week has been a blur of trains, meetings and sleeping in strange beds. And somewhere among all this I’m pushing towards handing in a thesis at the end of September. Things have been kind of busy.

If anyone wants a clue about what’s going on in Montpellier, read Ed’s blog, because I’m kind of out of the loop.

However, I was introduced to Le Quatuor last week – and thought it was worth sharing: four highly accomplished classical musicians who have turned to physical comedy… well, for laughs.

I think the entire performance on their DVD is funnier as a whole, rather than the few excerpts you can find on YouTube. I’m surprised they aren’t more known outside France: most of the jokes are physical or musical, and their dialogue-based sketches are carried out in a surreal mélange of German, Italian, English, French and Spanish (check out their music lesson sketch).