etnobofin

Tomorrow I leave Montpellier for the big city, a job and the real world. I’ve enjoyed my 9 months here, and that’s really down to the people I’ve met and the friends I’ve made. I’ll miss the city and it’s easygoing style, but I’ll miss the people more.

I reckon that I made more friends in 9 months in Montpellier than I did in 2.5 years in Oxford. Don’t get me wrong, my Oxford friends are wonderful, (and they know who they are) but the quantity and ease of contacts made in Montpellier has been extraordinary.

In Montpellier, I seemed to spend a lot of time going out, despite my student budget. Having drinks and late-evening meals as the sun sets over the old town. Watching films at the Cinéma Diagonal and Odysseum. River-swimming at the Pont du Diable. Wine tasting on the Esplanade during les Estivales.

It has been, as you might imagine, a pretty wonderful lifestyle, and I even managed to complete a masters thesis in between the fun I was having.  Whatever happens next in the big adventure, at least part of it has been spent living in the south of France.

So I’d just like to say thanks to my friends here, and especially to anyone I’ve left off this list! : Ariel, Ed, Severine, Isabelle, Claudia, Daniel, Laura, @paztek, Dédé le Camionneur, Eva, Nadiha, Wendy, Georges, Serge, Mick’n'Hazel, Mariannick, Janice, Alain, Nancy, Pierre-Yves, Raphael, Marion, Amandine, Régis, Lazare, Marie-Anne, Camille, Shamille, Dany le Setois, Cathy and Nathalie.

It’s not an adieu, it’s an au revoir. I’ll be back.

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!

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).

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.

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)

As anyone who follows this blog will notice, there hasn’t been much activity over the past week. Several topics were mooted. (Inter alia: racism in France, quality of life vs income, general annoyance at swish travel writers and foodies who rave about holidays in Languedoc, but have have never spent more than a fortnight here at a stretch, treating the place as some kind of thyme-scented culinary theme-park for their fabulous friends from Manhattan without regard for the region’s crippling rate of unemployment).

But none of these ideas ever got past the neural sub-editor in my blogocortex. In addition, a combination of heat, thesis-writing and job-hunting has been eating into time normally spent composing blog posts.

So, here’s a glass of wine from last night’s Estivales, and it comes with the hope that there’ll be some more action soon. A la votre.

There’s unlikely to be any posts here for the next week – I’m spending 7 days in the UK for some meetings and catching up with friends, mainly in London, Birmingham and Oxford.

I’ve decided to leave my laptop and home, as a bit of an experiment to see if I can run my life from my HTC Diamond (pictured – it’s kind of like the Google Phone, but runs smelly Windows Mobile instead of Android).

I’ll be tweeting, so you can follow me on twitter, if you expect anything profound or amusing might cross my mind during the week.

Take care and see you soon!

Here’s a little Web 2.0 story. Over the past few years blogging has become an increasingly integral part of the media, for better or for worse, and one of the side-effects of this is that content produced by “normal” people (like me, I suppose)  is more likely to be picked up and used by major media outlets.

ReadWriteWeb is a tech blog run out of New Zealand, rated by Technorati as one of the top 20 blogs in the world. They published a piece yesterday about Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-Harvard inspiration for Facebook. Prior to Harvard, Zuckerberg was a student at Phillip’s Exeter Academy, and the photo they chose to illustrate the piece was a photo I took last year during my short trip to New Hampshire:

Phillips Exeter Academy in the snow – March 29th, 2008

I found out about the photo’s use via Paul Spence at Genius Net, who tweeted the news overnight. (See, I told you it was a Web 2.0 story)

For extra coolness, ReadWriteWeb content is syndicated to the New York Times site, so although the New York Times version of the story doesn’t contain the photo, I still get a credit at the bottom of the article.  Does this make me a citizen journalist or something ?

Possibly due to having too much free time and no other life, spoken word podcasts have become a little bit of an addiction, providing an easily digestible form of non-fiction and current affairs that doesn’t involve picking up a book.

None of the podcasts I subscribe to generally deal with music, although occasionally music does crop up, including Radio Open Source‘s tribute to Dave McKenna – recordings of, and interviews with, one of the finest solo jazz pianists of the past half century. Here’s a taste:

Dave McKenna: Blues (excerpt from Radio Open Source)

Listening to Lord Melvyn Bragg somewhere over northern Europe in 2006

A favourite format of mine is the long-form conversation, where two people talk for an hour or more, with minimal editing. In fact, the less production I hear, the more I enjoy the podcast. Over a couple of years, a regular listening schedule has developed that has effectively created a personalised on-demand radio station on my iPod. The lineup looks a bit like this:

• Electric Politics: George Kenney‘s weekly interview show is recommended for anyone looking for deeper perspectives on how America really works (or doesn’t). For better or worse, George’s show has done more to shape my political views over the past few years than any other single influence. Consistently illuminating
• Radio Open Source – Chris Lydon hosted the first ever podcast, and he still churns out interviews several times a week. Unashamedly “liberal” but very eclectic, some recent highlights include Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis of the Darfur phenomenon, and James Carroll on being an American and a Catholic today.
• NPR’s Speaking of Faith often posts soundfiles of its raw conversations, and I often find these more useful than the edited broadcast show.
• Knowledge@Wharton – Business and Economics themes from the staff at Wharton Business School
• In Our Time – Melvyn Bragg‘s Thursday morning roundtable about the forces shaping our intellectual world – science, theology, medicine, literature, philosphy, architecture. A show about everything, except for last week, when they talked about Nothing.
• This American Life – Andrew Dubber reckons this is the best radio show in the world. Who am I to argue?
• Rue des Entrepreneurs – Economic and business viewed through a spectacularly un-businesslike prism, every Saturday morning on France Inter
• Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 – OK, so I have a crush on Sandi Toksvig, alright?
• 2000 ans d’Histoire – Now I’m living in France, this weekday show helps in widening my understanding of the social, political and military history of the place.
• A Prairie Home Companion – Garrison Keillor‘s inimitable descriptions of life in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

I should probably make more of an effort to keep up with things back home in New Zealand – for instance maybe subscribing to Chris Laidlaw’s Sunday morning show on Radio NZ National? I’ll just have to find time to fit it into the schedule…

George Kenney (Image: Chad Evans Wyatt)

I imagine a conversation. We pick at blades of grass between brown sandals. The illogic of our story spins skywards over the city, soaring in the blue miracle of it all.

I imagine a conversation. You describe how an afternoon rainshower pulls the dust from the air, leaving distant hills vacant and sparkling.

I imagine a conversation. Somewhere during the music, you tell me I am made of dust, and I am surprised that this makes me happy.

I imagine a conversation. It is on a beach with footprints. We laugh as islands rise from the ocean like fish.

I imagine a conversation, which stretches for hours across a damp basement in summer. A storm tugs at the corner of a window. We snigger at our fragile bravado.

I imagine a conversation, among northern snowbanks that lie immobile by the roadside. Our talk is careful like chess, with voices muffled by whiteness.