Paris, Je t'aime un petit peu

This post is out of chronological order, so if you have strong opinions about the linear nature of time then I suggest you email it to yourself last Thursday and read it then. Otherwise you could just marvel at the fact that this is the 21st century and I'm sitting in a four hundred year old barn in Southern Germany rocking a solar-powered wi-fi connection at about a zillion bytes per second. This means you can read about the events of last week now rather than in three months' time when they reach you by sailing ship, which would have been the situation as recently as a heartbeat ago in geological terms.

The barn is important, because it's really the second barn in just over a week. I'll fill you in on this barn another time - the focus at this stage is really the last barn. You should know though that in this barn there are two German lads dicussing the best way to make their old yellow Volkswagen truck go, and I am bound to say I like their chances. Not because I know a thing or two about old Volkswagens, which I don't, or because I understand what's wrong with it - even if the problem was in English I would be unhelpful. But they are approaching the project with such calm enthusiasm, and an air of such compentence and optimism, that it would be nothing short of unjust if the god of old yellow VW trucks (Thor, in case you're wondering) didn't throw them a bone. Plus they've got these guys to help them out:



The last barn was about forty ks outside of Paris, which is a good place to be. Louis XIV knew that, so he put together a pretty serious sort of a house and garden arrangement just down the road from where we where at, and the two places couldn't be more different really.

Louis's place

Nicolas's place.

Both places do show a strong commitment to indoor-outdoor flow, and to an understanding of the fact that Paris smells like a sewer, so the best way to live there is actually to live nearby. Beyond there, the similarities end. At Versailles, the gardens are mostly laid out in the sort of straight lines you get when you give a monomaniac a large budget and a free hand. At the place we stayed, which belongs to a composer called Nicolas and I didn't catch his last name, the garden is much more curvy and interesting. What happened was, he found this enourmous barn about twenty years ago, after it had been empty for long enough that the forest had moved in. He cleaned it out, fixed it up, built some rooms down the side, put in an amazing recording studio, and laid out a really quite tasteful garden. There's a couple of other families living there too, in flats down the side, and there's a gypsy caravan and a hillbilly cabin in the woods for travelling musicians to sleep in. In short, the whole place is pretty much a three-dimensional dictionary definition of the word 'haven.'






As well as being a haven, it proved to be a great place to practice what I call 'my French,' and the others call 'Samlish.' France is a great nation because even though everyone there speaks English, their national sport is pretending not to. Under cover of making an effort to foster international understanding, I took this as an open invitation to do frankly horrible things to their language. Mostly they were too polite to tell me that I make even less sense in French than I do in English, which only drove me to further excesses. What I like to do is start a conversation about something really quite boring and complicated, like the differences between race relations in New Zealand and in Australia, and pass it through the filter of my two and a half years of Hutt Valley High School French. When I run out of French words to express my poorly thought-through opinions, I just use an English word but with a sort of Inspector Clouseau accent, and wave my hands around Gallically. It usually doesn't take long for people to give up, politely congratulate me on my attempts to communicate en Francais, and then switch to flawless English for the remainder of the evening. After that we can talk about more interesting stuff like which is the better Led Zeppelin album out of Led Zep two and Led Zep four. (Four, for my money.)

And yeah, there was a little orphaned fawn there too. He looked delicious but it would have been rude to eat him.

I know I sound like I didn't like Paris much, but the truth is I actually did like Paris a bit, it's just that I'm not very good at communicating. I didn't really hit the best side of Paris until the afternoon of my second day there, though. The first morning was pretty blurry because we'd just spent the night driving from England, taking a midnight ferry to save a lousy ten euros, which will buy you about half a beer in Paris. Most of the rest of the first day was spent sleeping, which is a great thing to do in any city of the world. Then we had a show, and a stage is pretty much a stage once the lights are on, so it wasn't really until the next morning that I got to take a look round.

At this time I was still quite gammy from my tumble in Calais, so I spent the morning limping painfully around the centre of Paris getting annoyed at all the big old buildings in my way, waiting for the romance to kick in. Basically, though, Paris is only romantic if the one you love is actually there at the same time as you, otherwise it's just a big pile of stones beside a mucky river that smells like wee. If you're in a certain frame of mind, or if you have a guitar on your back and a limp and the sun is very hot, then the people who are there with the ones they love, or the people who were only there for the weekend but hooked up anyway and who spend an inordinate amount of time snuggling in front of postcard-like scenery, just become a gigantic pain in the ass. So I spent the morning seeing things like this:

And this:

And pretty much ignoring things like this:


And this:


Then I remembered that I wasn't actually in Paris to look at stuff, because it's all been looked at such a lot already, so I went to Montmartre to do some busking. Suddenly Paris got way more fun, and I didn't even mind limping around as long as people kept throwing Euros at me. Money is a good painkiller, and it's a lot eaiser to see the point of the most romantic city in the world when a lot of people's idea of 'romance' seems to include giving money to buskers. Still a very smelly place though.

Nice quiet place to count your money after an afternoon's busking

Paris is burning

To clarify: Paris isn't burning. But St Vincent sounds really good on the Paris-Bern autoroute.

But: if ever you are in Switzerland, go to Cafe Kairo and eat all their food. We did, and it was amazing. Then this morning we were going to swim in the river they have here, but the risk of death was assessed as too high. Now we have to get to Stuttgart before the anarchists reclaim the streets at six p.m. They're German anarchists, so they've politely told everyone what time they're going to do it. Perhaps Stuttgart will be burning by the time we get there. I'll let you know.

This is just a fawn I was hanging out with the other day. I pretty much felt like I could control animals with my mind.

This is hardcore

I mentioned the other day that I have a number of ambitions for this tour, of which growing a beard and making money are only two. One of the others, and a very important one, was to be invited to play violin in a psychedelic instrumental band at a hardcore metal festival in Belgium. Everybody said that it was unlikely to happen and that I should probably think of a different ambition if I wanted to actually achieve my goals, but I like to aim for the spectacularly unlikely in life. And now I can report that the events of last weekend permit me to type a sentence people thought I never would, which is this: I went to Belgium to play violin in a psychedelic instrumental band at a hardcore metal festival. A lot of this blog, like much of my life, is pure fabrication, but that sentence is nothing but the truth.

Here's how it went down: a couple of weeks ago, Reuben got an email from these guys who run an event called Ieperfest saying essentially that an Emerald City were booked to play at it, along with Agnostic Front, Converge, and a bunch of bands with names like Alien Foetus and Satan's Autopsy and basically combinations of words calculated to trouble peoples' parents. He was confused, because who wouldn't be? But he replied and said yeah sure we'll do it, but you have to get our violinist over from the UK and back in time for him to play at the 12-bar club on the Monday. I guess he thought they wouldn't go for it.

We should be clear: An Emerald City are not a hardcore band. They rock out and stuff, and there's probably a few bands out there that they could beat in a fight, and they like to jump around, but they're not hardcore and I'm pretty sure they don't want to be. I'm not hardcore either, for the record. I play the violin, and when I'm not doing that, I play noodly fingerpicking guitar, and when I'm not doing that I play mandolin in a psychedelic folk band. I write songs about birds. Hardcore isn't on the menu ordinarily.




Nevertheless, on Sunday morning, after playing four of our London shows over the previous few days, I dragged myself out of bed and onto the Eurostar, which dropped me in Lille. While I was in Lille I experienced a feeling that I'm coming to associate quite strongly with that part of the world, which is the one you get when you forgot to Google the town where you were supposed to end up to find out what country it's in. I was thinking France, but Belgium was a contender also, then there was a good twenty minutes when I couldn't remember if Belgium's even a country, and if it is, where it is. Then I remembered about places like Luxembourg and I stopped trying to figure it out.

As it turned out I didn't need to know where I was anyway, because these two guys picked me up with a little sign and a chillybin full of beers, and I don't know what language they spoke at all. They drove me down some motorways past a whole heap of cemeteries, and it started to dawn on me that Ieper is actually the same place as Ypres, but in a different language, which means it's one of the places where a lot of people's great-grandfathers got sent to die face-down in the mud. That kind of made the whole thing a bit more hardcore.



If you close your eyes and imagine what a hardcore festival might be like, you've pretty much got Ieperfest sorted. A lot of black clothes, a lot of guys who looked like they could waste me at Dungeons and Dragons, and a lot of guys who looked like they could waste me in general. Actually, mostly just a lot of guys. I think hardcore music might be more of a boy thing. Certainly my brief and unscientific observations of the bands playing on the same day as us revealed that Jess Emerald City was one of only two women playing that day, and the crowd was mostly boys. Nobody was as well dressed as Sam and Reuben, and you can read why here. Actually, just look at them:



We played our really not hardcore set, which was mine and Jess's Emerald City onstage debut, and it was tons of fun for everyone. So we all went back to the van and had a little disco with music we'd brought with us, because honestly and with great respect, hardcore music is really quite hard to listen to for any length of time. Even very short lengths of time. It wasn't long at all though before I had to jump in a van with a guy called Paul, who runs a bookshop, and had been dragooned into driving me to Calais. Unfortunately for him, he spoke pretty good English, so he had to listen to me talk the whole way there.



What with one thing and another, one thing being the GPS and the other being a pretty casual approach to programming the GPS on the part of whoever's job it was supposed to have been, we were running late by the time we got to the ferry at Calais. That meant that I was moving pretty fast towards the terminal as I pulled my ticket out of my pocket to check the fine print. Trying to do two things at once has ever been my downfall, but usually my downfalls are of the more metaphorical kind. This time, though, a poorly placed flowerpot type thing combined with my inability to multi-task to make the metaphorical literal - I tripped over it and executed a beautiful swan-dive into the pavement.

I must have really had my eyes on the prize, because I rolled to my feet spitting out bits of tooth and barrelled straight up to the check-in counter, where the nice man told me firstly that my ferry was delayed so I needn't rush, and secondly he would get me something for my face, which I then realised was bleeding enough to make me look seriously anti-social. Going through UK immigration looking like I'd just been in a fight was a lot smoother than I'd thought it might be, which gave me a fair bit of time before my boat to investigate the tooth situation. It turned out I'd broken the top of one of them. I didn't really mind, though, because it's one of those stupid teeth you don't really need. It's one of the plant-eating ones that are basically just an evolutionary hangover from when humans were herbivores, before we developed better teeth to eat awesome things like meat. I try to only use my meat-eating teeth anyway, so it's no loss really.



When we got to Dover, the implications of a delayed ferry in England on a Sunday night began to sink in. I hadn't had much of a hand (actually any of a hand) in booking my travel, so I was only when I limped up to the Dover train station that I realised that my ferry had been perfectly timed to connect with the last train to London, which wasn't going to wait forty minutes for no delayed boat. Fortunately I tend to not really experience emotions when I'm by myself, beacause there's no point really unless someone's watching, so the situation didn't get me down much. I thought 'that's a bit shit,' made myself a little camp outside the station out of an umbrella I had with me and the outside of my violin case, and spent the night on the pavement. That was about as comfortable as it sounds, and my face hadn't even stopped bleeding. I did have the enormous satisfaction of being the only person on the first commuter train to London the next morning with two seats to myself though, because I looked like I'd played at a hardcore festival, fallen on my face in a carpark, and slept in a train station, so nobody wanted to sit with me.


I got back to London about 24 hours after I left, and way more hardcore. That night me and Tim did a gig at the 12-bar club, and I had a lot of fun walking around looking like I'd been in a fight. That's what I thought, anyway, until I had a conversation with the barman as I was packing up my gear.


'Do you reckon I look like I've been in a fight?'

'Not really mate, no.'

'what are you talking about? I've got a fat lip and chipped tooth, and I'm limping like a pirate.'

'It's just that you're a bit of a skinny lad, and if you'd been in a fight I'd imagine you'd look a lot worse, you know what I mean?'

'But what if I knew karate or something?'

'Wasn't that you playing the violin earlier? I doubt you know karate, mate.'

'What if you didn't know that I'm really a bit of sissy, would you think I'd been in a fight then? I mean, look at my lip and stuff.'

'To be honest mate, when you walked in I just thought you had a coldsore and a gammy leg. You can't really see the tooth.'

'Oh right, thanks then.'

Why did I say thanks? Because I am well brought-up, that's why. Not really hardcore at all in fact.