etnobofin

In the summer of 1969, a mail sorter at a New York post office received a letter addressed “To The Greatest Drummer in the World”. There was no address or return address and the sorter wasn’t sure what to do.

Fortunately, there was a former drummer who worked the front counter of the Post Office who promptly found Max Roach‘s address and forwarded the letter.

Max Roach received the letter and said, “Oh no, I’m not the greatest drummer in the world.”

Max then promptly forwarded the letter to Gene Krupa.

Gene Krupa looked at the envelope and said “Somebody must’ve made a mistake.”

Gene then forwarded the letter on to Buddy Rich.

Of course, Buddy had been waiting his entire life for that moment.

He read the words “To The Greatest Drummer in the World” and smiled from ear-to-ear as he ripped open the envelope.

The letter began, “Dear Ringo….”

Humanity is blessed with the gift of play. OK, maybe dolphins, monkeys and baby snow leopards play sometimes too, but only humans have rules. And the more complex the rules are, the better the game. I was reminded of the joy of complex play when I found that the Les Inconnus had invented a wonderful game show called Simple Comme Bonjour:

Simple Comme Bonjour is in many respects the French version of that favourite British pastime, Mornington Crescent. While I always prefer playing under the 1897 Diamond Jubilee Rules, (in which shunting is only allowed in two-syllable stations, and double parallels are punishable by a penalty lap via Cape Town), here’s Humphrey Lyttleton and friends playing computerised Mornington Crescent in 2007:

While the grand tradition of complex play is a strong vein within British culture, it’s an activity that Americans largely discarded in the late 18th century. Thomas Jefferson famously described Mornington Crescent as a symbol of all that was most corrupt about monarchy – but that was only after Ben Franklin had beaten him in three minutes flat with a cheeky switchback through Seven Sisters on a bank holiday timetable.

However, one of the most advanced examples of complex play ever attempted on television is Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s Shooting Stars. Unfortunately, the game show has been in hiatus recently, apparently after an acrimonious breakup between George Dawes and his singing partner, the baked potato.

I only took one photo while I was at Les Deux Alpes, and this is it – the view from my hotel window on Friday afternoon. It was the best weather of my stay: on Saturday and Sunday the clouds rolled in, making skiing well, not impossible, but certainly difficult with 20-metre visibility.

As is traditional when I head to the mountains, I made a video. The 2010 edition is fairly modest compared with the meisterwerks of 2007 (Slovenia and Switzerland). But at the end you do get to see a bunch of clueless skiers traversing a fresh avalanche on Monday afternoon…

The avalanche came down over one of the blue runs, and must have been very recent – soon after we crossed the avalanche, the ski patrol arrived with rescue dogs to check whether anyone had been buried… as the weather warms up, more of these snowslides are likely across the Alps, and the ski patrols are on alert.

The other drama of the holiday was getting caught in the nationwide strike on SNCF on Tuesday. It took me 10 hours to get back to Paris instead of 6, and I stood all the way from Lyon to Paris in the restaurant car of a TGV. However all the passengers were very tolerant of the crowding and the young train crews (it seems it’s the new employees who are left to provide the service minimum during strikes) were having a lot of fun running a TGV all by themselves.

Arriving back in Paris, spring had well-and-truly established itself. The city seemed to have a smell again, and there were birds singing in the still-nude trees on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Arriving back at my apartment, the gardien was clearing the mailboxes as I walked in the front door.

“Bonjour monsieur vous allez bien? Ca commence à faire beau maintenant, hein?”

“Effectivement.”

There aren’t any leaves on the trees yet, but something’s in the air. This week it got to 18 degrees in parts of Paris, and the café terraces are filling with people who still look like they don’t quite know what to do with the glorious weather. I took this photo the other day on the way to a business meeting…

However winter is not quite over in the etnobofin household: I am off to the Alps for a long weekend sliding around on a mountain. So in the interim, I’ll leave you with a taste of one of the pinnacles of French culture – Pigloo:

Former All Black Byron Kelleher has found a new home in Toulouse, and after three years here, he’s become one of the key players for Stade Toulousain, and a crowd favourite. He’s also learnt to speak French…

As another anglophone in France who still struggles sometimes with the language, I don’t want to seem like I’m mocking him: learning a new language as an adult is not easy. But Byron’s mixture of Otago English and the accent de Toulouse is, er, original…

He says he wants to stay in France after he retires from the game, and I wish him very well – there are much worse places in the world to settle down than the southwest of France.

Last night I went to a concert at the Sorbonne given by the Sorbonne Scholars, a university society that recreates the music of 16th and 17th Century England (vraiment on trouve de tout à Paris…). It was my first visit to the Sorbonne, and the concert was held in the rather magnificent Amphithéâtre Richelieu.

The concert was a hommage to Henry Purcell, probably England’s foremost Baroque composer, and a particular highlight was a couple of “catches” – rounds written for male voices with popular and occasionally profane lyrics. Here’s one called Julia:

(Yes, you heard the words correctly. Once the Puritans left for America, life in 17th Century England was AWESOME. Apart from the plagues. And the fires. And the wars.)

The catch Sir Walter Raleigh is lyrically far more explicit than Julia, and you can watch and listen to it here.

Of course, Purcell’s more spiritual music was featured heavily, including this Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis with a rather lively Nunc Dimittis section (more recent composers tend to use slower tempos for the Nunc Dimittis, which after all are the words of a dying old man).

The only drawback to the evening was the rather cramped and hard seats in the amphithéâtre. The room is an interesting architectural setting for early music, but the rather antiquated seating was designed evidently for 18th century students less than 5 foot 4 tall, (or hobbits) and it took all of the length of my walk to the metro station afterwards to uncoil myself…

Our gonzo tourism adventures in Paris continue. This morning we set off to explore an often-hidden and seldom-mentioned face of modern France: traditionalist Catholicism and the practice of the Tridentine Mass.

The church of St Nicolas du Chardonnet is located in the 5th arrondissement, in between rue des Ecoles and the eastern end of boulevard St German. It would just be another typical parish church in Paris, were it not for the fact that since 1977 it has been illegally occupied by the Society of St Pius X, a conservative Catholic organisation that rejects the reforms of Vatican II.

Performing the Tridentine Mass – Image: Lawrence OP (Creative Commons)

Without going deeply into ecclesiastical arcana, essentially St Nicolas du Chardonnet is the only place in Paris where the Mass is still said in Latin in its “Extraordinary Form” as laid out by the Council of Trent of 1563.  Unfortunately, the parish is also associated with extreme right-wing politics.

So it was with some trepidation that we turned up on Sunday morning for the 10.30 Grand-Messe Paroissale. We hoped an attitude of  respectful curiousity would see us through.

Image: Joethelion (Creative Commons)

The service itself was solemnly executed and very beautiful, requiring a robed contingent of about 20 priests, acolytes, and altar servers. Even in Latin the service was largely recognisable to anyone familiar with the Eucharist in French or English, (although the “extra bits” such as the sung Asperges Me with the priest sprinkling the congregation with holy water were novel to us).

The choral singing was generally fairly good, bar some wobbly bits. Unless you brought with you your own copy of the Latin Missal, there was no order of service: the people were clearly expected to know the Mass by heart and respond in Latin (with kneeling and standing and sitting and crossing themselves at appropriate moments).  It was as if the regular attendees were members of a special club with secret handshakes and nods and winks that rapidly distiguished those of “true faith” from the curious interlopers.

Tridentine Rite at Oxford Blackfriars – Image: Lawrence OP (Creative Commons)

The sermons and Bible readings were the only parts of the service in French, and the sermon was particularly robust – a 32 minute admonition to chastity and “mastery of one’s body“, with frequent reference to papal encycicals and the lives of saints. Hell was mentioned as a consequence of bodily sin. Not only was the tone marginally threatening, the message seemed explicitly intolerant and offered a very narrow view of the world we actually live in.

The overall impression of the morning was that we had travelled back sixty years in time: even the few children and families at the service looked like they were dressed out of a Jean Renoir film. Outside the church after the service, we emerged blinking into the bright spring sunlight.  A man was distributing FN tracts denouncing the European Union, another was selling copies of the royalist newspaper Action Française.

We decided we had had enough, and quickly repaired up the hill to a café for a quick lunch of croques-monsieur. Our brief encounter with radical Catholicism and narrow religiosity was deeply fascinating, but unlikely to repeated.  Sometimes, there are better things to do on a Sunday morning.