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More crumbs from the weekend… not only did I visit the Saturday market, I also went to Le Vert Anglais for a burger (according to Ed, the best burger in France, and I won’t contradict him!)

A burger and Orangina under the pine tree on Place de Castellane is a good way to spend a few hours on a sunny Saturday.

The Languedoc summer provides perfect conditions for an outdoor meal of tapas, accompanied by well-selected bottles of Rioja and Pic Saint-Loup in the old town. It’s great to catch up with friends, and after so many months in Paris, it’s nice to remember that the Spanish border is not so far away after all…

My visit to Montpellier coincided with the Comédie du Livre – apparently the second-largest book festival in France – bringing hundreds of authors and BD artists into town.  Fans of all ages flocked to the tents set up on the Place de la Comédie and the Esplanade to get that personal dédicace from their favourite author or dessinateur.

To complement the burgers and tapas, some intellectual nourishment was in order. On Sunday I attended a live broadcast of L’Esprit Public on Radio France Culture, held in Montpellier as part of the festival.

I am fascinated by the particularly French respect for “talking heads”, and the broadcast featured some heavy hitters of the French intello-politico-media-élite: historian and member of the French Academy Max Gallo, politician Jean-Louis Bourlanges, journalist Philippe Labarde, and law professor Dominique Rousseau.

Philipe Meyer played the role of genial animateur, orchestrating the egos and brainpower at his disposal with alacrity and humour.  The topics for the show were the European deficit crisis and reform of the French education system. You can listen here.

The often controversial right-wing polemicist Eric Zemmour was supposed to participate in a live debate on Sunday afternoon. Having seen Monsieur Zemmour many times on television I was looking forward to seeing some sparks fly. But for some last minute reasons he was unable to travel to Montpellier for the festival.

Despite Zemmour’s absence, his “opponent” Jean-Francois Kahn delivered a fascinating session on the dangers of groupthink and la pensée unique – Kahn was highly critical of the French media and its role as a critic and commentator.

Keeping up with all that abstract debate was thirsty work – and there is no better way to round off a weekend in the south of France than with a pastis at sunset!

This weekend was spent back in Montpellier, catching up with friends. On Saturday morning I visited the Marché des Arceaux with Ed Ward (read his Montpellier blog here).

With up to 80 local farmers and producers turning up each week, this is Montpellier’s premier source of fresh food in Montpellier – always worth a stop if you’re in town on a Saturday or a Tuesday!

I spent much of today out in the rain, collecting footage for a little video project I’m helping with. With a video camera in your hand, it’s amazing how quickly you come to consider the city as your own private film set.

Pedestrians, traffic and background noise constantly interrupt your shots, and it gets a little frustrating. Next time, we’re going to call the police to shut down a couple of streets for us.

To help us construct a storyboard, we used Charlie Brooker‘s indispensable guide to “How to Report the News” as inspiration. Even if you’ve seen it before, it’s always worth watching again, because it’s very clever:

Parisians seem to studiously ignore the Eiffel Tower. When it’s mentioned in conversation, it’s described rather disdainfully as “Un truc pour les touristes“. The most famous monument in the world is generally not worth the attention of local residents.

Although I’ve been to the base of the tower several times with visitors, I’ve never felt the urge to climb it. I prefer to avoid crowds where possible. At the Tower the tens of thousands of tourists, hawkers and armed paratroopers do not make for a pleasant atmosphere.

However, last night I swallowed my pride and we reserved a table in the restaurant on the first level of the tower.  It was (surprisingly) good fun. You pay a premium for eating there (65EUR set menu), and you must reserve in advance.  But the food is GOOD, with a decided slant towards seafood: I chose smoked salmon as an entrée and scallops as a main course.

I should point out that we ate at the “cheap” restaurant. If you want to eat higher up the tower, in the Restaurant Jules Verne, be prepared to fork out 200EUR for the set menu.

Climbing the tower gives you the chance to look down upon the crowds queueing to do exactly the same thing as you. I took the photo above at 9pm, with people casting long silhouettes in the setting sun.

A visit to the Tower helps you appreciate the amazing technical feat of building such a structure out of iron in 1889.  It may be a tourist trap, but quite frankly it deserves to be famous. For 40 years it was the tallest building in the world (1889-1930). Today it is still the second-tallest structure in France after the equally impressive Viaduc de Millau.

But perhaps the best reason to go up the tower is precisely to see “Paris without the Tower”. Without the Tower, Paris spreads out in all directions, with small punctuation marks (the Left Bank domes of Les Invalides, the Institut de France and the Pantheon) piercing its uniform 7-storey roofline. The white and cream stone rolls all the way out to the suburbs beyond the périph where apartment blocks mark a barrier between the city and the rest of the country – a barrier that is just as effective as the old city walls.

From the Tower, you can sweep the northern horizon to see symbols of Paris past and future. On the Butte de Montmartre stands Sacré-Coeur, the bad-taste memorial to Paris’s own little civil war of 1871 which killed 20-30,000 citizens. And further to the west stands the business district of La Défense, a vast money refinery on the horizon that pumps a GDP the size of Greece back into the capital each year, funding its faded glory.

This weekend the Champs-Elysées has been filled with trees, vegetables and farm animals in a project called “Nature Capitale“. It has been organised by the Jeunes Agriculteurs (that’s Young Farmers’ Assocation for you kiwis), who trucked thousands of plants and livestock into the city on Saturday night.

News reports say that 2 million visitors are expected to pass along les Champs over the two days of the event. I visited this afternoon, and it felt very much like an A&P show, (that’s Salon d’Agriculture for you Frenchies), except for the cafés on the footpath and the gendarmes with machine guns.

The BBC News site has some good photos of the event. Tomorrow night, the farmers pull everything up and fade back into the provinces, and the most elegant avenue in the world reverts to be a thundering canyon lined with expensive shops and overpriced restaurants for tourists.

Today has been the first really hot day of summer here, and the city has come alive. Paris is not a winter city – dull grey weather is not flattering to the monochrome, uniform architecture of Baron Haussman. But now with the trees in leaf and people crowding the streets, Paris deserves its reputation as the most northerly city in southern Europe.

Batucada Sound Machine is one of the many bands that grew out of Auckland’s funk/soul scene in the early years of the century. As far as I can recall, the scene congealed around a certain number of DJs and musicians. Club nights and the audience followed.

The scene was characterised by large-scale bands such as The Hot Grits, Tangent, Opensouls and one million dollars. If one were poetic and lazy one might say that the music reflected Auckland’s urban and cosmopolitan identity: jazz, soul, hip-hop, afrobeat, latin and funk congealing in one big sweaty mess.

Sound engineers either relished or dreaded the prospect of setting up a stage for a dozen musicians including horns, berimbau, harmonicas, surdos and multiple vocalists. A 24-channel desk was a minmum requirement. As were fun but low-budget music videos:

Of course, apart from a few forays to Australia, the sheer size of these bands has meant that they haven’t been heard often beyond New Zealand’s shores. BSM is an exception – a 2006 tour saw them play venues across Europe including WOMAD Reading.

This year they’re back in Europe for a month of gigs across the continent and the UK. They are definitely worth catching if they’re playing in a town near you. You will like them, and you will dance.

Here are the full tour dates:

June 11 2010 Blossom Festival, Alfândega da Fé, Portugal
June 12 2010 Ollin Kan Festival, Vila Do Conde, Portugal
June 15 2010 Music Box, Lisboa, Portugal
June 18 2010 Sala Caracol, Madrid, Spain
June 19 2010 Sala Joplin, Segovia, Spain
June 25 2010 Bitterzoet, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
June 26 2010 Afro Latino Festival, Bree, Belgium
June 27 2010 Wereldfeest, Utrecht, The Netherlands
June 28 2010 Colos-Saal, Aschaffenburg, Germany
June 30 2010 Universum, Stuttgart, Germany
July 1 2010 Café Hahn, Koblenz, Germany
July 2 2010 Scala, Leverkusen, Germany
July 3 2010 Bar Du Matin, Brussels, Belgium
July 4 2010 Lustspielhaus, Munich, Germany
July 5 2010 Spectrum Club, Augsburg, Germany
July 7 2010 Guanabara, London, UK
July 8 2010 The Stables, Milton Keynes, UK
July 9 2010 Durham International Brass Festival, UK
July 10 2010 Norwich, UK
July 11 2010 Mouth of the Tyne Festival, Newcastle, UK

It was on Monday afternon that my companion suggested visiting another landmark of the Paris restaurant scene.  We were drinking beer on a café terrace on the Place des Vosges, next door to Victor Hugo’s house: the setting perhaps lent itself to formulating grand plans. And this grand plan involved nothing less than Brasserie Bofinger.

Having nothing else planned for the evening, and after much thought and consideration (lasting 5 seconds) I assented to the suggestion. We made a reservation for the slightly-less-Anglo-Saxon hour of 8pm.

We were seated in one of the three upstairs rooms, up a spiral staircase that offers a great view of the Art Nouveau interior. Opened in 1864, Bofinger’s decor still offers the impression that the siècle is about to reach its fin.

However Bofinger’s reputation has preceded it, and there were a certain number of English and American accents on the tables around us. I also got the impression that the “tourists” were sent upstairs out of sight, while regulars were given preference in the grand salon under a spectacular illuminated stained-glass cupola.

For entrée, I chose an aubergine lasagne – tomatoes and stringy cheese in all the right places, while a certain other member of our group ordered half a dozen oysters: a dish that came with half a dozen pieces of special hardware including a dish of ice, fingerbowl and extra sauces of various descriptions. The butter was, of course, appellation controlée, and possibly the best butter we’d ever tasted.

My mistake was to have ordered an entrée. Because my main course was the Choucroute Spéciale Bofinger: a minor mountain range of choucroute with three different kinds of sausage, pork ribs, duck breast and potatoes. It was good, but perhaps a little too much for a single sitting.

We had however chosen the wine well – a moderately priced Alsatian Riesling which matched everything. I was defeated by the choucroute in the end. While my companions ordered dessert, I opted for a decaf espresso and a period of monastic contemplation.

Overall, I don’t think I would come back to Bofinger, unless a visitor to Paris really wanted to experience one of the city’s classic restaurants. The food was good, but not outstanding.

Far more entertaining was the activity in the rest of the restaurant. The waiters expertly shouldered enormous silver trays of food, wine bottles, glasses and napkins without ever dropping anything – even on the spiral staircase which led to the kitchen. The service was, like at Polidor, unfussy and professional.

Most impressive of all were the seafood platters ordered by our neighbouring tables – vast 100-euro-a-head affairs that looked like the entire cast of Spongebob Squarepants had been massacred on a satellite dish. Yes, we took photos.

All too soon it was time to leave. As my friend pointed out, almost nobody ever passes through Bastille métro station compeletely sober, and this time the buzz of Riesling was enhanced by a slow, deliberate waddle brought on by a little bit too much good food.

I’m on a diet for the rest of the week.

Bofinger
3 Rue de la Bastille
75004 Paris
Menus start at 30EUR (Seafood platter for two: 112EUR)
Open 7 days
Reservations recommended

I don’t write much about food here, which seems strange since I live in a city famous for restaurants. However, this week has involved visits to a couple of notable Parisian eateries. So I thought I’d recount our experiences.

Image: Stephen Rees (Creative Commons)

Saturday night I suggested the Polidor, of which I had heard good things. It’s just down the road from me, behind the Odéon. It’s one of the oldest traditional bistrots in Paris, and regular customers included James Joyce, Boris Vian, Rimbaud and Verlaine. Despite its illustrious connections, it is not overrun with tourists and hence offers a menu at suitably reasonable prices.

Having not booked, we thought we’d arrive at the stereotypically Anglo-Saxon hour of 7.30pm – the theory being that we would not have to compete with locals for a seats.  As it was, the place was almost full already, and we got places on a long table in the front room, next to a talkative French couple.  Everyone at the Polidor shares tables, and this is part of the fun.

The place makes the most of its humble bistrot beginnings, and is everything a Paris bistrot should be – mirrored walls, wood panelling and red-and-white checked tablecloths.  It’s noisy and the service is unfussy and rapid: it’s worth remembering that the bistrot was 19th century Paris’ equivalent of McDonalds.

Image: Ed Swierk (Creative Commons)

We all chose the menu fixe at 25EUR. For entrée I had a rather stunning blonde lentil and foie gras soup, which came served in a brown stoneware bowl. In case you’ve never thought of putting foie gras in soup before – trust me, it works, and it’s delicious.

The main course was a rich and satisfying boeuf bourgignon – with chunky carrots. If some of the meat was a tad dry in the middle, the situation was rapidly resolved with application of the oodles of sauce that accompanied it.

For some reason I chose a bottle of Madiran to accompany the meal. It may be the wine with the highest level of antioxidants in the world (one glass makes you cancer-proof for a week), but it was a little heavy-going as a food wine. My theory was that its southwestern origins might have complemented the foie gras soup. However I should have stuck with my first intinct and chosen a Burgundy: more subtle as an accompaniment to the boeuf bourguignon.

Dessert was also simple, understated and divine – a rasberry bavarois in a red berry coulis. Enough said.

Overall: eat fast, eat well. Polidor was excellent value with very good food, good service and an “authentic” bustling atmosphere. For 30EUR a head including wine, you can do a lot worse in Paris.

Polidor
41 Rue Monsieur le Prince
75006 Paris
Menu 25EUR (or à la carte)
Open 7 days

Note – Polidor does not accept credit cards, a policy it has proudly maintained since it opened its doors in 1845.

Every so often, it’s worth checking in with Alan Wilkis, an artist/producer who’s been featured several times on this blog . You can read a little more about his music in my previous posts here and here and here.

Beavering away in his Brooklyn laboratory, Alan seems particularly busy at the moment producing remixes for all sorts of people. I particularly liked his latest project, a remix of Phantogram‘s “Mouthful of Diamonds“:

Once again Alan takes some unlikely raw material (in this case, the trip-hoppy, slightly industrial-sounding Phantogram original) and given it the “Wilkis Polish”: he turns it into a little drop of Orangina-flavoured dance pop that says “There’s a party in my iPod and everyone’s invited!“

I get a lot of messages in my blog inbox from bands and promoters wanting me to review and post their new music.  There’s simply too much to listen to, and since this is not just a “music” blog, I tend to only post stuff when I really like the music and if the artist’s message is nice, and particularly if it’s personalised.

This week I got one such nice message from Paper Swords, an folk-rock quintet from Southern California, which has been quick off the mark into the studio – according to their biography they only formed this year! Here’s a little taste…

The band consists of Ryan Myers (vocals, guitar, banjo, harmonium, piano), his brother TJ Myers (drums), Patrick Grant (bass), Russell Fletcher (trumpet, banjo, guitar, harmonium, vocals), and Teresa Ramallo (vocals, piano/keys, guitar).

If you like rich orchestrations and interesting songs, they’re worth checking out.  They do a particularly nice job of meshing TJ’s angular drumming with more traditional “folk” instrumentation – in this way they remind me a little of Laura Veir‘s erstwhile backing band Saltbreakers.

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a sucker for time signatures, so I have to recommend their song Bethseda, which is written in 21/8: but you’ll have to buy their EP “Wax Moon, Wane” to hear it! As a statement of intent, the EP is very impressive – hopefully there’ll be more music forthcoming soon!

A couple of sample tracks are available via their website, otherwise go to iTunes to pick it up.

Paper Swords – Wax Moon, Wane [Buy on iTunes]