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The French have a word, pharaonique, to describe any project that seems over-ambitious. National computer systems, networks of tramlines or new art galleries designed by Frank Gehry are all considered pharaonique, implying that they are likely impossible to accomplish, certainly over-visionary, and quite probably narcissistic.

Burj Dubai nears its completion (Image: Joi, Creative Commons)

The news this week that Dubai’s main state-controlled investment vehicle, Dubai World, is near collapse, really should not have suprised anyone. Back in 2006, I started paying attention to Dubai because it fell into my region of responsibility at work. After the stories I heard from salesmen in the region, and what I read online, it made instinctive sense that the Emirate’s vast property-based gold rush was unsustainable.

My amateur analysis was not based on a calculation of debt ratios. It was simply the halo of exuberant optimism that orbited Dubai that provided a warning. In Dubai, everything was going to be bigger, taller, better than the rest of the world. Real estate prices would never fall, and the Pharoah’s thrusting vision for his kingdom was infallible.

Dubai’s apparent bankruptcy provides no pleasure. But like the current world financial crisis, the fable of Dubai should make us cautious of  predictions of endless prosperity. It’s not that ambition should be discouraged: without it we wouldn’t have landed men on the moon, given the vote to women, or discovered penicillin. But the development of a scepticism gene might be a very healthy thing.

(Image: Monica R., Creative Commons)

Which brings me tangentially to the Oasis of the Seas, a piece of engineering which seems to fully embody the folly of us all: an energy-munching mobile shopping mall designed to shuttle between America and a few developing nations in the tropics while stripping its passengers of as much money as possible. It’s the perfect realisation of insulated hedonism. A floating Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

The allure of cruise ships escapes me. I can’t understand how anyone would want to spend precious free time in a Ritz-upon-Sea which offers little except good weather and a plasticised, hyper-controlled “guest experience”. I’d rather holiday in Invercargill.

It’s a pity that there are unlikely to be any icebergs floating near Florida in the near future.  If it sank, at least the Oasis of the Seas would provide a powerful poetic metaphor for our time, as well as a screenplay for another film by James Cameron or Michael Bay.

Sometimes I get the impression that all of us are (figuratively, of course) floating around in an air-conditioned bubble of ignorant bliss, zapping zombies on our Xbox while the planet collapses around us. Drinking champagne in anticipation of the big fireworks display at the end of time. I just hope their are enough lifeboats for everyone.

[*EDIT: thanks to klari for correcting my spelling of "pharaonique" ]

I’ve only heard Stornoway play live once: it was midnight in a rain-soaked field last year just off the M40 near Aylesbury or Thame or somewhere. In any case, it was dark and wet. There were 15 people in the crowd and the band was almost drowned out by the rave tent next door. It was hardly an auspicious evening.

But something about their music must have stuck: possibly the strong melodies and their ability to look and sound like a folk-rock band without being a folk-rock band. I came home, bought all their mp3s (all eight of them), wrote a blog post, and now their song Here Comes the Blackout is one of my top-played tunes on last.fm.

So having followed the band for over a year now, it’s gratifying to see they’re building some solid buzz: they played Glastonbury this year, became the first rock band ever to play a concert in the Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (oh to have seen that gig!), and most recently appeared on Later with Jools Holland:

Although they’re not signed and have no album out yet, their song Zorbing is already an anthem on the Oxford scene. It’s a piece of music which typifies Stornoway’s approach: apparently ramshackle, amiably round-vowelled, but cleverly structured and very catchy. It’ll be interesting to see what 2010 brings for these chaps.

Saturday dawned bright and largely cloudless, an invitation to explore the city with a camera. However, by the time the necessary haircuts and shoe-shopping were complete, a more typical winter greyness had descended over everything. Nevertheless, after lunch I set out for The North, where, I was reliably informed, Paris had hills.

Télégraphe, on line 11, is one of the deepest métro stations in Paris, mainly because it’s right underneath one of these hills. After a steep ascent by escalator, the station deposits passengers a vertiginous 128 metres above sea level, next to the Cimitière de Belleville. Here, in the 19th and 20th arrondissements, you feel a long way from the Paris of the grands boulevards. The unemployment rate in the 19th is 16%, and 40% of residences are state-funded habitations à loyer modéré (HLM).

But on the slopes below the massive tower blocks are some surprises: rows of semi-detached villas dating from the late 19th century, each with its own garden. As Paris expanded after 1860, these tracts of land were bought up by bourgeois Parisians looking for cheaper and more spacious accommodation than could be found in the central districts. Here, among the working classes, they attempted to create a rural idyll on the outskirts of the metropolis.

These arts-and-crafts houses clinging to the sides of the hill are all individually designed, a striking contrast to the uniform Hausmannien style of architecture elsewhere in Paris. A timid cat dodged between garden gates on the cobbled walkway.

Further down the hill, place Rhin et Danube felt more like the quiet square of a provincial town than a part of Paris.

By the time I reached the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the light was beginning to fade. The park’s fanciful theme-park feel (cliffs topped with a 19th Century re-imagining of a pagan temple and a concrete grotto complete with waterfall) somehow seemed less charming in the afternoon gloom.  Within the park, a footbridge crosses a railway cutting where a small length of the mysteriously abandoned Ligne de Petite Ceinture disappears into a tunnel.

The only remaining spots of colour in the day seemed to be chalk drawings left on the damp asphalt: birds, elephants and hopscotch tracks. The metro line back to my part of town was still a long way off, so as dusk settled in, I continued down the hill and back into the flatlands of everday Paris.

Went for a walk down the river this morning. Paris was gleaming slightly in low November sun. It was all rather lovely, but strangely unmoving. It felt like a morning for climbing a mountain somewhere, not walking beside the Seine.

The people spending their weeked along the banks seemed filled with a sense of obligation, rather than joy. Joggers paced the cobblestones, kids clattered on trottinettes beside the dock for Les Bateaux-Mouches. Tourists were taking endless shots of the Pont Alexandre III: its rather monstrous imperial statuary seems to demand attention, as if its designer could never settle on just creating something beautiful.

Today, we headed up to the Arc de Triomphe today for the Armistice ceremony.

It was the first 11th November since 1918 that German soldiers and the German Chancellor were present on the Champs Elysées.

Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy AND Carla were there…

…the French got to wear silly hats (these are students of the Ecole Polytechnique)…

…and the Germans got to stand in long, organised rows, in order of height…

…so, all in all, a rather satisfying celebration of Franco-German cooperation!

Today, there’s plenty being written elsewhere about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’ll leave all that for better-informed and better writers to get busy with, and just stick to some of my own memories.

Potsdamerplatz, Berlin

In April 1989, when my family booked tickets to fly to England and Europe the following November, we had no idea that we would arrive in time to celebrate the fall of communism. My English grandfather had just had a stroke, and the long NZ summer holidays of December/January offered the last chance that the family could travel to visit him while I was still a child airfare.

My sister and I, who had never been overseas before, spent an excited few months preparing for the trip: reading up about the sights of London, learning little phrases in German and poring over Mum’s Collins University Atlas, tracing train routes that would take us through unknown countries called France, Holland and Switzerland.

After Christmas in England, we crossed the Channel in the dead of winter and by way of Oostend and Amsterdam, found ourselves in Germany to visit Mum’s old friends in the Ruhr valley. The Wall had been down less than two months at that point, but the ripples of the fall seemed evident everywhere we went: the trains were stuffed full of East Germans, perhaps visiting family or simply enjoying spending Christmas in the West for the first time.

GDR-era Mural, Federal Finance Building

The Silvesternacht we spent in Germany was one I’ll never forget… we kids were allowed to let off fireworks across the cul-de-sac, drink sekt and participate in the inexplicably German tradition of Bleigießen. At midnight we gathered around the television, watching crowds of East and West Germans celebrating together at the Brandenburg Gate.

A piece of history arrived, quite literally, a couple of days later: a package arrived at the door, containing lumps of asbestos-laden concrete. The brother of Mum’s German friend was in Berlin, and had hacked off enough pieces of the wall so that we New Zealanders would have something to take home with us.

The Reichstag Dome

That trip to Europe happened at an impressionable age, and probably sparked my ongoing interest and love of that continent. We played in the snow on the Jungfrau; I chased my sister around borderstones on the frontier of France and Switzerland; and when on a cold January morning 1990 we stared up into the mist on the Champs de Mars to try and spy the top of the Eiffel Tower that was missing in the gloom, I had little idea that twenty years later I would be able to speak French and live in Paris.

In their wisdom, our parents made me and my sister write a diary during our trip. So I can still read what I thought at the time (I was mostly interested in playing with Lego and running around borderstones). And I still have that piece of the Berlin Wall, although it’s currently sitting in storage in Birmingham.

So, just like Nicolas Sarkozy, I was not in Berlin on the 9th of November, 1989. But as a young kid, I did manage to be in Europe right at the end of the 1980s. Ride on Time by Black Box was top of the pops, and it felt like the wheel of history was turning.

Coke ad in East Berlin

(All photos in this post were taken during my March 2008 trip to Berlin)

Psalm 23 (for Toby) (arr. Rowley)
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

Back when the world was a little younger than it is now, I sang in the chapel choir at my prep school. Recently, an mp3 conversion of a 1991 recording of the choir (complete with tape hiss) has fallen into my hands. Hearing this music again provoked reflection on an important phase in my musical education.

Surprisingly, 18 years later, the cassette doesn’t entirely make me cringe. We were a pretty decent choir – nowhere near the standard of King’s Cambridge, but entirely respectable for a bunch of 10-to-13 years olds. A few flat kiwi vowels rather ruin the Latin of Fauré’s Ave Verum; the phrasing and timing of consonants is a little haphazard, but overall, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s strange knowing that all those unbroken voices now belong to men who are fathers, engineers, lawyers, marketing lecturers and dentists, living in half a dozen countries. One of us has even served tours of duty in Afghanistan. At one time we were all choristers.

My four years in the choir were entirely formative. First of all, we learned performance discipline. We had four 8am rehearsals on weekday mornings, and four sung services a week (3 weekday chapels and 1 Sunday service), all year outside school holidays. In later musical projects, that sense of committment remains: if you’re in the band, you’re part of a team: turn up to rehearsals, and do the gigs. No excuses.

Benjamin Britten – There is no rose from Ceremony of Carols (Op.28)
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

For me, one piece we performed stood out from the rest of our repertoire – Britten’s There is no rose from his Ceremony of Carols. It sounded deep and ancient, a hint of a wider musical world that we might encounter in years to come. At 13 years old, singing Britten somehow seemed serious work, like we were actually performing real music, whatever that was.

Hindsight is treacherous. The imagination has a habit of creating links to the past that perhaps aren’t there. But I can’t help believing that a big part of my love for music finds its roots in endless winter mornings spent in chapel, all those vocal exercises, the routine of robing and the inexorable rhythm of the Book of Common Prayer.

We probably didn’t completely appreciate what we were doing at the time, but almost two decades later, all that singing starts to make sense.

Stephen Sondheim – Send in the Clowns
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

Charles-Marie Widor – Toccata from Symphony for Organ No. 5 in F Major

St Germain-des-Prés is named for the famous abbey which has stood near the walls of Paris since the 13th century. But this morning, in time for mass on All Saint’s Day, and on the suggestion of my friend William, our destination was the quartier’s other well-known church. The Église Saint-Sulpice is nearly as big as Nôtre-Dame, and almost as famous: it even features prominently in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, for those who care.

It was nice to celebrate mass on November 1st (although the choir was frankly decrepit and the lack of an order of service made it occasionally difficult for us Protestant-raised anglophones to join in the sung responses in Latin and French).

However our real motivation for visiting St Sulpice was to hear the organ. William is an organist in his other life, so visiting St Sulpice is something of an obligation while he’s living in Paris.

Originally built in 1781, the great organ at St Sulpice is the only intact surviving example of the work of French master organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.  The organist at St Sulpice from 1870 to 1933 was Charles-Marie Widor, who composed one of the most pieces in the organ repertoire, the Toccata from his Symphony for Organ No.5

After the service, the postludes were an opportunity to hear the instrument in full flight – a Toccata sur Placare Christe servulis by Dupré, Franck’s Choral 1 en mi majeur and Gigout’s Toccata (one of William’s party pieces apparently).

On our way towards the exit, we absently joined a short queue of people who we thought were waiting to climb the church towers. In fact, quite by chance it was the line to visit the organ loft: a fact we discovered by asking the guy in front of us, a rather dapper looking gentleman who apologised for his bad French and turned out to be the organist at Turin Cathedral !

Up the spiral staircase we emerged among the pipes and blowers of one of the most famous organs in the world. It’s at least three storeys high and possibly has its own postcode. In the middle of it all was the saint des saints… the 5-manual organ console where Widor actually composed his Toccata.

Holding court between services was the titular organist, Daniel Roth who before coming to St Sulpice in 1985 was organist at Nôtre-Dame for 12 years. Long tenure is a tradition at St Sulpice. Since 1619, there have only been 12 named organists. Widor himself occupied the seat for 64 years!

William managed to have a chat with Daniel Roth for a few minutes, where apparently they got to geek out about speaking stops and bourdons and jeux de fond.  In among the pipes there was a little lounge containing photos and autographs of organists who have played at St Sulpice, including Albert Schweitzer, (who as well as being an organist managed to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. As you do.)

After our morning’s organ pilgrimage, we emerged into the rain and headed for lunch with William’s fiancée – a superb meal at Le Pré aux Clercs on rue Jacob. We found out later that this bistrot was Ernest Hemingway’s favourite. In St Germain-des-Près it seems you are only ever one wine glass (or an organ stop) away from history…