etnobofin

According to some people, midnight tonight marks the end of a decade. At first glance it’s hard to see how far we’ve come in this time. It’s been a decade of Dick Cheney, Harry Potter sequels and The X Factor, but surely there’s been some personal growth going on beneath the radar too.

Tash tweeted today that “we grew older, further apart and closer together, grew deeper, wiser, more foolish. Lost and found hope, but didn’t grow Up.“  Which is lovely, and possibly true if I could work out what it meant, but I thought I’d try to capture some of the spirit of the “noughties” (as I experienced it) in ten photos…

2000: living in France the first time round, learning to be an Alsatian. Hanging out in a small town at the foot of the Vosges, hiking in the hills to work off the tonnes of tartes flambées consumed.

2001: back in Auckland, joined one million dollars.  For a short period, we were something like the biggest little funk band in the land: albums, low-budget music videos and collective food poisoning in Vanuatu ensued.

Flatting in Western Springs in the first half of the decade: I learnt how to be (mostly) a vegetarian and make leek-and-potato soup.  In between cooking, we used the kitchen to make low-budget music videos.

Helping out with youth group leadership at St Paul’s Remuera, I ended up driving the van on our now-legendary ski trips. Little sleep was had by all involved, but we did get to see Paradise.

2004-06: Getting wrapped up into the free improv scene in Auckland, we formed slightly inexplicable musical units such as the Dominion Centenary Concert Band. Audiences didn’t understand what we were doing, but that was OK, because neither did we. But the costumes were fabulous.

2005: Got paid a moderately obscene sum of money to be an extra in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. It turned out to be one of the worst films of the decade, but at least the costumes were fabulous.

Over the course of the decade, I managed to ski at Le Markstein, Châtel, Méribel, Val Thorens, Arolla, Zinal and Grimentz (in Europe); and at Whakapapa, Turoa, The Remarkables, Coronet Peak and Cardrona (in NZ). My skiing didn’t improve much, but I fell down a lot and bought a helmet.

2006-2008: In Oxford, another spiritual home was discovered. A town where you can consult mediaeval manuscripts in the Bodleian and chase semi-wild horses on Port Meadow within 15 minutes walking distance.

In the UK, one slightly inexplicable musical project got replaced by another: The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band. It provided an excuse to tour the pubs of Oxfordshire.

2009: finally made it back to France on the back of an MBA degree. Montpellier was hot, friendly and offered great opportunities for hiking, including the lovely Gorges de Lamalou.

So somehow I’ve finished the decade by moving to Paris. Looking back, it’s been a busy ten years, and I’m thankful for the good friends and family who have shared it with me.  I always had the impression I could have fitted more in, but in fact quite a lot got achieved anyway despite the procrastination and the blogging.

I hope the next decade is just as action-packed. I just wonder if the costumes will be quite as fabulous.

Have a very Happy New Year, all of you, near and far.  All the best for a peaceful and fulfilling 2010.

My blogging has been sparse lately – work has been very busy, and these past few days I’ve been taking visitors around Paris to see the sights. It’s been an interesting experience becoming a tourist again – Paris is a VERY beautiful city, we’re lucky to have the chance to live here.

To all the readers and visitors here, have a wonderful, peaceful and happy Christmas, and all the best for a prosperous and fulfilling 2010.

Ferris wheel on Place de la Concorde

Christmas lights on the Champs-Elysées

Exploring other corners of Montmartre, still in the footsteps of Robert Sabatier

Ice-skating outside the Hôtel de Ville

Arte continues to throw up some amazing documentaries. Last night it was the Dutch-produced film Autour du monde à bord du Zeppelin – Le journal de Lady Hay. It compiled footage of the August 1929 circumnavigation of the globe by the airship Graf Zeppelin, with narration based on the journals and letters of the sole woman on board, Lady Grace Drummond-Hay.

The round-the-world trip was in part sponsored by William Randolph Hearst, who negotiated exclusive newspaper rights for the trip for English-speaking countries. The journey left from Lakehurst, NJ, passing through Friedrichshafen, over Berlin, Russia and Siberia to Tokyo, and then onwards over the Pacific to Los Angeles before flying eastwards via Chicago back to Lakehurst.

It was a grand and risky adventure: supplied with erroneous maps, the airship had to dump tonnes of ballast to climb over the Stanavoy Mountains in Siberia. Encountering a storm over the Pacific, the zeppelin lost radio contact for two days. Newspapers around the world reported that the ship had crashed.

Lady Drummond-Hay’s on-board companions are equally colourful. The Soviet representative is enraged when the captain Hugo Eckener abandons plans to overfly Moscow due to adverse weather. A stowaway is discovered: a young man trying to fly to Hollywood to become a movie star. And she constantly records the awkward relationship with her erstwhile boyfried, the journalist Karl von Wiegand.

However what is most remarkable about the film is its vision of the planet midway between two World Wars.  As the airship flew over Berlin, the passengers witnessed violent scenes in the streets below: Germans protesting war reparations. The Berlin flyover was intended to celebrate German engineering prowess, but instead, Lady Drummond-Hay records  her shock at the political violence. A few years later Germany turned to fascism, and swastikas were painted on the Graf Zeppelin’s tail.

Graf Zeppelin over Basel, Switzerland, 1930
(Casas-Rodríguez Collection, 2009 – Creative Commons)

Retrospectively, this voyage marked the end of an era, a grand gesture summing up the excess and progress of the 1920s. Six weeks after the Graf Zeppelin triumphantly circled Manhattan at the end of its circumnavigation, the Wall Street stockmarket crashed. The world entered an economic depression that was really only resolved by a second World War.

Lady Grace Drummond-Hay is largely forgotten today, but in the 1920s and 1930s was something of a celebrity: a journalist and the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air.

As war correspondents in the Philippines in 1942, Drummond-Hay and von Wiegand were captured by Japanese troops and spent three years in a prison camp. Returning to New York, Drummond-Hay died in 1946 of health complications arising from her captivity. A movie could certainly be made of her life: this documentary is a fascinating starting point.

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)

Winter hikes around the coastal lagoons

Ruined farmhouses in the arrière-pays

Asking directions from the locals, somewhere in the garrigue

Marsillargues cherries bought fresh from the Marché des Arceaux

Orangina, shady trees and a boules tournament in Sommières

Oh, and vineyards. Lots and lots of vineyards.

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!

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!)

Zanskari women during transhumance (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve decided that Arte is possibly the best TV channel in the world. Last night I happened to stumble across an amazing documentary by Marianne Chaud called Himalaya, la Terre des Femmes.

Marianne Chaud has previously made films about India and wrote her doctorate on popular theatre in the Himalayan Ladakh region. La Terre des Femmes is essentially a work of ethnography, made in 2007 during her long stay in the remote village of Sking in Zanskar valley at 4000m, a region of Kashmir where the culture is predominantly Tibetan.

Barley fields in Zanskar (Image: Paul A. Fagan, Creative Commons)

The film follows a summer in the lives of the villagers. The men have left for the season to find work in distant towns like Leh and Manali, and the women and children remain to herd the yaks, harvest barley and collect grass for animal feed in the coming winter.

Chaud is not just a bystander but an active participant in the film, and grows particularly fond of a 13 year-old sheperdess, who lives on her own with a herd of yaks. In the absence of men, the women speak openly of their life histories, their hopes and fears.

Farmhouse in Zanskar, with winter feed piled on the roof
(Image: bobwitlox, Creative Commons)

What develops is a compelling portrait of a people who live largely isolated from the modern world, and rely on centuries-old transhumance practices to live in such a harsh environment. The nearest town is 4 days walk away. Everyone, from 5 years old to 80 years old, works in the fields every day.

The only intrusion from beyond the valley is the occasional sound of an aircraft high overhead. The sheperdess asks Marianne, “Inside an aeroplane, how many carpets are there?” “Why carpets?“, responds Marianne. “So you can sit down of course!” laughs the sheperdess. In Zanskar, there are no chairs, because there are no trees, and no timber. The shepherdess has never seen furniture, let alone been in an aeroplane.

The Himalayas as filmed by Marianne Chaud are a long way from the “Lonely Planet” images of picturesque monasteries and prayer-wheels we’ve grown accustomed to. La Terre des Femmes is a gentle, human and intelligent film that ranks among the most beautiful things I’ve seen on television for a very long time.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow mark the 40th anniversary of the New York recording sessions that produced Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. The album was released in April 1970.

I really shouldn’t say much more about the record. But I still think it’s a miraculous piece of work. I found a copy in a friend’s dad’s LP collection as a teenager (the vinyl had hardly been played) and made a tape of it which I thrashed to death.

I took the tape on a school trip to the USA, and have distinct memories of playing it on a long bus trip across the high desert of Arizona. Kerouac’s Visions of Cody was in my bag, and the redness of the desert stretched out like the surface of that other planet Miles and his crew were trying to reach with this music.

As I’ve written before, it was heady times for a teenager. I’d like to think I haven’t completely lost that particularly notion of existence that formed in the apex of those three forces meeting: Wayne Shorter’s solo on Spanish Key, the vastness of the American continent with signs pointing to Albuquerque and Kerouac’s love poem to the vanished idea of a friend.

Ignoring that Indian proverb about mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun, and needing a break from writing my dissertation, I set out on a mission yesterday to explore Montpellier’s slightly neglected river – the Lez.

On the map, it seemed like a simple exercise – following the river from Antigone northwards to Castelnau and then catching the tram back from from Place Charles de Gaulle. However, Montpellier has not quite reconciled itself with its river, making the journey more of a trek through suburban streets than a waterside ramble.

I started out at the eastern end of the Antigone quarter – a complex of monumental buildings aligned along an axis running a kilometre from the Hôtel de la Région all the way back to the Polygone shopping centre in the centre of town.

Antigone was designed by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, and although some praise its sweeping vision, I’m sweepingly unconvinced. The whole thing is vaguely totalitarian, as if it were dreamt up in fever dream by Ceaucescu. The scariest thing is people actually choose to live there.

I’ve been told by a couple of people that that fountain in the river was designed to be taller that the jet d’eau in Geneva – but when they switched it on, it soaked the diners on the terraces of the chain restaurants on the opposite bank. So today fountain plays at 33% strength. True or not, it’s a nice anecdote.

Continuing north from the Esplanade de l’Europe, the footpath soon deviated away from the riverbank – and I realised that despite the other magnificent infrastructure investments made by Montpellier, there was no public right of way along the banks of the Lez. Instead, you have to thread your way through side streets, very rarely glimpsing the river.

I never made it to Castelnau – my route involved traversing the main railway line, and the only crossing point was a road tunnel without any visible pedestrian footpath. So I backtracked through Les Aubes and Les Beaux-Arts (a rather interesting, slightly bohemian central suburb) to the centre-ville and caught the tram home.

Re-reading my map, it seems the northern stretches of the Lez are more promising for a riverside walk. So my next plan is to start from Place Charles de Gaulle and head north from there towards the zoo. I’ll just wait for a day when the temperature isn’t quite 34 degrees…