The Insoluble Pancake

At the great wall

2011-10-19T20:59:00.001+02:00

I am back again in my room at the campus of Peking University. It's Sunday morning and I can hear the birds in the trees outside -- and what I now recognise as the sound of distant construction works. Construction never stops here. In China, work like that doesn't stop for the night or the weekend. In Xinlong, at the observatory, in the forest, we often passed a derrick drilling a well to bring fresh water from deep underground. Drilling continued all day and all night, making a clanking, grinding noise which could be heard all around the observatory. In the morning, returning from our observations, lights still burned on the drilling platform and through the trees we could see three or four workmen wrestling with heavy machinery or leaning against the derrick and watching the drill bit slowly spiralling downwards. In the corner of the clearing I could see a small green tent, and nearby, clothes were strung out on a line. Did they sleep here? If they slept here, how did they sleep with the unending noise of the drilling?

Yesterday we did not return directly to Beijing - instead, we went first a little further to the north and south, taking us to Great Wall - note the capital letters. Over the past ten days, during my arrival in Xinlong and last Monday during our excursion to the Qing tombs, we could often see sections of the wall around us on distant hilltops, some of it restored, some of it crumbling and showing the passage of time. But on Saturday, we drove (or rather we were driven, by once again our gracious host, who had never yet visited that section of the wall) to Jinshaleng, where there is a very large section one can walk -- more than four or five kilometres of total length I think, although we only walked a fraction of this. It is quite remote, around two hours from Beijing and consequently there are far fewer people than on the more heavily frequented sections like Badaling, where most buses from the capital arrive. So it was a real privilege to visit there.

We arrive at the parking lot at the foot of the mountain at around midday. Despite the supposed remoteness of the location, we find that the parking lot is already full. A cable car takes us to the wall; the cars advance with maddening slowness, swaying slowly in the breeze, trees below scraping the cabin. A trapped fly buzzes angrily in our cabin for perhaps fifteen minutes, but there is no way to open the window. We can hear people talking on their mobile phones in cars passing in the other direction.

Then we arrive, and jump from the cabin. Leaving the platform, I see the wall from close at hand for the first time: not only is the nearest section only a few hundred meters away, I can see both to my left and right sections disappearing down into valleys only to rise up again on more distant hilltops even further along. The wall continues across the mountains until it merges with the distant misty horizon, always tracing the crest of the hills, following the steepest path imaginable, continuing on. At each hilltop there is a guard tower of perhaps two or three stories in height, and it is one one of these guard towers which is our first direct contact with the wall.

Through the northern windows of the tower we see the rugged hills disappearing into the distance. To the south, the same hills, and near the southern horizon sunlight through the clouds picks out a shimmering distant lake -- this, I am told, is the main water reservoir of Beijing. Here at the wall, the sky is overcast although an occasional patch of sunshine slides across the hills. There are a fair amount of people at this part of the wall, so we continue to walk. We don't have enough time to walk the entire four kilometre length of this section so we will turn around after one hour and head back and retrace our steps.

After walking for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, there are already far fewer people. Here there are long, straight sections of the wall where we are almost alone with the exception of or two locals trying halfheartedly to sell us "tea coffee beer". Standing there on the wall I am reminded of Angelopoulous' film "The hanging foot of the stork", a film about frontiers and borders. Imagine, says a character in the film, I stand here on this bridge, a bridge on a river dividing two countries, and I raise my leg on the border line, in the middle of the river, the centre of the bridge: where am I? Where am I indeed. We walk further along the wall, up the steepest steps I have ever climbed in my life, and I think the same thing as Angelopoulous' character, here on this wall separating civilisation from the outer darkness. At the highest point, a kilometre from where we arrived, I can see the wall extending far into the eastern distance, merging with the horizon. I wonder how it must have been to be here in the darkness of night six hundred years ago, surrounded by this desolate and empty countryside. I see the soldiers eating their noodles, drinking tea and straining to hear sounds or distinguish shapes of against the darkened treeless hills. Fearing the arrival of intruders.

Suddenly, it seems, it is time to return, although we have no particular desire to leave the summit of the mountain where it is quiet and peaceful. We retrace our steps, leaving the further western reaches of the wall unexplored. It will have to wait for a future trip. The return to Beijing is uneventful, although almost half of our journey seems to be spent crossing the endless sprawling expanse of this vast city, roads thick with traffic, people returning from vacation and weekends. Far in space and time from the frontier lands we visited only hours previously.

In Xinlong

2011-10-14T16:34:00.001+02:00

Last night on the mountain. I am at Xinlong Observatory (or "Xinlong observing station" as it's called in English around here), about two hundred kilometres to the north east of Beijing. I have been here for over a week now, teaching at a school of observational astronomy. The fact that there are around thirty or forty students here with myself and the other tutors, as well as an internet connection (no matter how slow or unreliable it is) makes one forget the remoteness of the location. But remote it is. Xinlong is the site of numerous small telescopes, as well as one much larger telescope constructed recently, LAMOST, an ambitious instrument designed to carry out large spectroscopic surveys of the nearby Universe. The nearest city to here, half an hour down the mountain, is Xinlong itself, a small village only ten years ago but now bursting with the concrete shells of immense half-completed sky-scrapers, full of brightly lit broad avenues (which is of course bad for the observatory).

My daily routine here this past week has consisted of getting up, pulling back the curtains and gazing out over the valley, a beautiful forested valley -- and filling up my Bialetti "moka electrika" (the same one that I took on the train to Tibet in 2007) with water and Illy coffee. That way, once I come out of the shower, there is strong coffee ready. Each morning I scrutinise the contents of the coffee tin, but I am reasonably sure I have enough to last to me until I return to France on Wednesday morning. Lunch and Dinner are at the unusually early (for me) and highly precise times of 12:00 and 18:00. We arrive at the canteen to find small metal trays full of several different kinds of meat and vegetables, usually quite good but -- arrive at 12.05 and it's cold. One thing we have remarked is that windows and doors are left open everywhere, and there is no heating -- and it's almost winter. Warm clothing essential. Everyone eats rapidly, in less than half an hour, and it is always the French who are the last to leave. In between those times -- helping the students, or trying to get some work done in my office.

My week here was interrupted by a trip given by one of our gracious hosts to the eastern Qing tombs, which lie perhaps fifty or so kilometres from here, but the trip was longer than this distance would suggest. We took a shortcut through the mountain, back roads which were in very bad condition-- in some places nothing more than dirt tracks. The journey started well enough, a new paved road, but soon after that the going became progressively slower. Throughout the countryside there are many small mines, coal amongst other ores, and the constant passage of heavy lorries has destroyed the surfaces. On the way we passed through countless small villages. Around here it is rural and remote, and agricultural, and the roads were often laid out with crops left to dry in sun -- posing a considerable hazard for the unwary driver. We passed many people shelling corn, the empty husks filling the streets. A thought flitted through my mind, I thought about passing within inches of people who live very different lives from mine, but then Ireland too has countryside and agriculture. The difference here is of course that everything is still heavily labour intensive and the industrial revolution is only just reaching the countryside.

The eastern Qing tombs themselves rest in the shadow of the misty green mountains, red temple roofs lie against a background of thickly forested hills. The grounds of the many tombs are enormous -- one cannot simply walk from one to the next, a car is essential. One arrives along a long, broad avenue lined with many stone animals -- this was the route that the funeral processions would make. Each tomb lies in a mouldy, underground cavern. The facades of many of the buildings -- some of which are more than three hundred years old -- were somewhat the worse for the passage of time. Out here in the depths of the countryside, hundreds of miles from Beijing, time has been allowed to take its course, and nothing has been restored, no new coats of paint had been given. Remember too that just on the other side of the mountains, once was the outer darkness, the invaders: the line of the Wall once snaked unbroken across those mountains over there.

The day of our visit was not just any day -- it was in fact one hundred years to the day that the emperor was deposed and modern-day china began its slow and painful birth. But on the day of our visit, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. We noticed no western tourists other than ourselves -- these eastern tombs are much further away from Beijing than the western ones, which, I understand from my guidebook, are usually on the circuit of tour-buses visiting the great wall. In any case, the emperors, although deposed, their palaces and tombs do not seem to have suffered too much from revolution revolution: living in France, where there is a long tradition of purifying fire, one expects perhaps otherwise.

Tomorrow: a descent from the mountain, and a return to the capital -- and on the way, at last, a visit to the great wall, to one of the more remote, less travelled sections.

Some reflections on cities and canals

2011-04-06T22:33:00.002+02:00

You have to imagine a tram, an orange tram sliding down a broad avenue
towards the sea, towards the blue waters of the pacific. Inside the
tram the seats are worn and faded and the floor has been eroded over
the years by the passage of thousands of feet. Wood and metal, no
plastic here. How could anything here be as old as this tram you ask
yourself, looking at the buildings around, all of which are new, all
of which have been built in the last decade or so it seems. This, as
they say, is all true. This is a tram which starts in Brera, Milan,
maybe somewhere near the Observatory and one that ends up a few
hundred metres from the Pacific. Arriving here a few years ago to
visit my Uncle (who had abandoned Ireland forty years ago and never
returned) I found these phantom trams gliding around the streets of
San Francisco. Strange to see them here. I was surprised. Commune di
Milano. Over there, they were something old, a witness to centuries of
neglect: buildings crumbling, the ancient worn streets; but in these
avenues at the edge of the continent somehow the ordinary became
extra-ordinary. To see these trams against the glittering water here,
where before they had been at best a thousand kilometers from the sea.
But how exactly does something commonplace become extra-ordinary?
Change the context. Change the time.

During my first visit to Milan I barely glimpsed the city from the
window of the taxi, just a flash of the ornate baroque glory of the
cathedral, night-time, illuminated, I remember my first meal, an
espresso, I was happy to have arrived. The centre of the city, the old
heart of the city. Brera, where the trams came from? Cobbled streets
worn smooth with time, the buildings black with soot, Bar Brera, the
press of people, and after that the ancient bulk of the museum. Where
was the observatory? The observatory was in fact inside the museum. I
had to walk across a broad courtyard, past a statue of Napoleon,
through the corridors full of students, half-glimpsed studios, walls
grimy with centuries of dust, until - there was the sign, it was here.
Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera. Climb the stairs.

There was a telescope here once, there still is, and back then maybe
the city was dark, there was not all this light and people. Giovanni
Schiaparelli turned his telescope towards a red dot in the sky which
was actually a planet, and he drew what he could see. Dark lines and
light lines, crisscrossing the planet, obviously someone had made
them. Here are the notebooks in the library, all is perfectly
explained, these were canals, of course, this was water obviously. He
drew until his eyesight failed, like Borges surrounded by his books.
Schiaparelli had perhaps visited Amsterdam, the low countries of
northern Europe. An ordinary thing like a canal in an extra-ordinary
location? There were really shining blue waters on this arid planet
that had never seen running water for a million years.

(not) meeting the man: Don DeLillo in Paris (October 2010)

2011-01-01T17:23:00.001+01:00

It's new years' day, 2011, and I realise with not a small amount of horror that I only managed one blog post in the whole of 2010. You would have thought that something catastrophic and life-changing occurred, but in fact all the catastrophic and life-altering stuff actually happened in the previous year, 2009. 2010 was relatively straight sailing, but I probably devoted perhaps too much of my energies to work I think... and it's not to say that nothing of note happened in 2010, which is not the case.

I'll pick out one event, more or less at random: Don DeLillo's visit to Paris last autumn. I was amazed to discover that DeLillo was coming to Paris to promote his latest book, Point Omega, and that he would be appearing at the L'abre a lettre in Bastille. I have been reading the man's books for at least twenty years. I have read every single novel he has written (except one I think) and what I really wanted was just to hear a few words of his books read in his own voice. He almost never makes a public appearance and so I didn't really want to pass up the chance of seeing the man at a bookshop less than 30 minutes away from here by metro.

I left work early. I was certain that the bookshop would be bursting to the seams, but in fact as far as I could tell, there were only one or two other people who had arrived before me, idly browsing the shelves. They looked normal. I made my way to the back, the store is very long and narrow, with almost no space for seating. At the very back of the shop there was a small skylight through which some weak, end-of the day winter light filtered through. About fifteen minutes before he was scheduled to arrive, one of the staff asked us somewhat apologetically if we could please keep our distance from Mr DeLillo, don't get too close to the table where he would be sitting, and if we did that then everyone would be happy. I don't know, who was expecting scores of screaming fans yelling at the man for his autograph, pushing and shoving their way to the front? Oh, and one other thing, DeLillo was a slightly delayed. One of his radio appearances had taken a bit too long.

We waited. People continued to arrive, until almost suddenly it seemed to me, the shop was almost full and I was standing at the very front of a crowd of maybe a hundred or so people. We were informed that DeLillo had stepped into the taxi and would be arriving soon. We continued to wait. After almost an hour or so after he was scheduled to appear, DeLillo appeared at the back of the room and made his way to the front.

DeLillo is no longer a young man, but I still think of the pictures of him I saw on the back covers of books I bought twenty years ago. I was suprised to see how he looks today. Time passes. I could hear the conversion between DeLillo and the bookshop staff. Would he be reading from his book? You know, I'm sorry, I really can't, my voice is shot from talking all day, he says in his Brox rasp, and I feel the man's age, I feel the strain of those long distance airplane flights and interminable waiting in aeroports, where we 'grow old' as DeLillo says in one of his books.

The bookshop staff move into "damage limitation" mode. Someone will read from DeLillo's book, from the French translation I suppose. DeLillo will sign books. We are asked to form orderly queues. The staff know well DeLillo's preferences, we are told it's okay to take photographs...'from the back' as DeLillo says, but not with the author. You know, some people like to have their picture taken with the author, we are told. I didn't imagine having my picture taken with this particular author. DeLillo puts on a black baseball cap which shades his eyes and makes them invisible. He looks out across the crowd to the back of the room.

I have none of his books with me. I have no desire to have a signed copy of the French translation of his latest book. I have no desire to hear his latest book read to me in French. I feel the man's age, and I feel that I shouldn't be here. What would I say? It's all in the books anyway, if you have a question, right? Less than five minutes after his arrival, I leave the room and take the metro back to my apartment. Peace, Mr. DeLillo, as that other great american man of letters, Kurt Vonnegut, might have said.

On measurement

2010-01-12T22:52:00.001+01:00

A lot of things have happened in the last twelve months; stuff that I haven't been able or willing to write about here. Maybe I will, eventually, but for now I will leave most of the consequences of that single unexpected, shocking event of 8th of February 2009 unwritten. But there is one thing I can say: the house where I spent seven or so years of my life, the house where I lived with my parents and my sister until I left Tyrone in the autumn of 1988 for Manchester is no longer our house; my sister handed over the keys to a local man, a neighbour, a few days ago.

The last time I spent a night in that house was there was at the tail-end of last year, in November. I returned to help my sister with all the things one must do if one sells a house; going through all the papers and reports, emptying the cupboards, looking through the drawers. I didn't do much in the house itself, other than reading twenty-five year old school reports which commented on my need to work harder in Physics and French. No, the task really reserved for me was to clear out my father's shed, the shed where had worked for many years as a stone mason, making headstones and monuments, chiseling names into granite slabs and polishing kerbs and crosses for later assembly in the cemetery.

I spent almost an entire Saturday filling trailer-loads of stuff, all kinds of odds and ends which came from not only my father's entire working life but also his father's working life. Each trailer-load I towed with my parents' old car through narrow country lanes to the Coalisland municipal dump, a few miles away across fields misty with winter rain. For whatever reason (in the overall scheme of things I mean) on that particular day at times it rained very heavily indeed and I hurled one item after another into the steel bins of the dump under a constant downpour submerged in the very weak blue-grey light of winter. At that exact moment, bizzarely, I knew that my cousin and aunt might have been strolling down the broad boulevards of Paris under brilliant autumn sunshine, because, as it so turned out, that was the exact weekend they decided to visit Paris.

In the shed there were heavy power-tools which had rusted from years of neglect, grinders and drills and polishers, heavy machines whose function was unclear to me. All kinds of compressors and mixers blasters and drills, dense lumps of steel and metal with dangerous-looking wheels and levels and pistons. Although most of them had rested inert for the best part of a decade, I still felt vaguely worried that they would unexpectedly spring to life when I approached.

The rain drummed on the shed roof while I piled high the trailer. In the rafters I found the wooden fence from the yard of the house in Cookstown where I'd lived as a child more than twenty years previously. The wood was covered with a very thick layer of dust and almost came apart before I could load it onto the trailer. As a small child, that fence marked the limits of the narrow area in our back yard my sister and I played in. My father had kept this fence here all those years.

I thought of my father's hands, hard and callused from a lifetime of hard manual labour. He hardly ever wore gloves. I remember as a child sitting on his lap and putting my tiny fingers inside his enormous hands, and I imagined that all people when they grew up would have hands like my fathers'. I remember the faint shock I felt the day I looked at the hands of my physics teacher and saw they were soft and slender, so unlike the my father's giant digits.

There were so many tools in that shed. There were axes and mallets and hammers and spades and shovels, rakes and hoes. There were chisels and drill-bits and countless drawers and cupboards filled with screws and nails. There was a small folding crane and out back there was a mixer and a wheelbarrow with a petrol engine. I thought of what the physical legacy of my own life-time's work would be: nothing at all. A few invisible bits flipped on hard-drives scattered across continents, if hard-drives were still around and were not replaced by something else even more incomprehensible to common sense. Nothing created. "You have to know how to work with your hands," which is what my father always insisted. I thought of Richard Powers' meditation that almost everything people do today consists of symbol manipulation, changing one set of characters into another, something computers are supremely suited to do.

Then there were the many rulers and tapes and spirit levels. One worn and scratched folding white plastic ruler I saved and took with me back to Paris. That ruler was an essential tool; one needed to know exactly where to drill the holes, to cut the kerbs, to lay the dowels. I remember my father using this ruler when I was with him during those long days at the cemetery. Although there were other rulers there in the shed which seemed even older, this was the one I took.

At the end of the day, after help from a friendly neighbour, everything was gone, the shed emptied. My hair was thick with dust, my clothes damp from the constant drizzle. Leaving the shed I put my hands in my pocket and found the plastic ruler. It was the only object I chose to save.

From Shanghai

2009-11-28T14:57:00.001+01:00

I've just returned from two weeks on the eastern edges of the eurasian continent, a few kilometers from the shores of the East China Sea. Shanghai. From there it's still possible to return to Paris without crossing water, but only just. I spent two weeks there to work with my friend Martin who has been there for three months with the astronomy group at Shanghai University -- I thought this would be a good opportunity to visit the city and to get some work done far from the distractions of Paris (which at the end of my stay I began to miss a little I have to admit). It's my second visit to China, although on my last visit I only spent a day or two in Beijing, the rest of my time was in remote provinces like Xining and of course Tibet. So this time I've really had time to see the city and experience daily life here.

Shanghai has had a long a turbulent history and has a very different ambience compared to the crypto-Stalinist streets of Beijing. Foreign powers competed for influence there in the beginning of the 20th century, and streets in the French concession area are surprising -- one could almost be standing in a street somewhere in Europe, if it were not for the signs in Chinese. Some of the architecture reminded me of the older building you see in the city centre of Victoria, Canada, not surprising really as they were constructed at approximately the same time, beginning of the 20th century.

When I was there with Martin we spent most of our time in the University area, leaving from time to time for forays into the Bund in the evening. There are many expatriates in Shanghai (someone told me there are more than 100,000 Germans there alone) and this has led to the creation of many expensive restaurants whose clientele is almost exclusively foreign as a consequence of their prices -- which are still only comparable to an average restaurant in Paris. There really is an incredible range of prices between al the different restaurants we ate at from the University canteen where a bowl of noodles are 50 cents to restos in the bund and downtown area which are perhaps ~30-50 times more expensive, even more. Everything can be bought in Shanghai, including tins of Illy coffee, for the price of ~14 meals at the university canteen.

I had terribly bad luck with the weather whilst I was there. The first two days it was unseasonably warm, and I complained constantly to Martin that I had brought the wrong clothes (he had told me to be prepared for cold.) The monday after I arrived the temperatures dropped steeply and it started to rain, and continued to rain for almost a week without interruption. I said to my friends: is this Shanghai or Manchester? One morning we left the apartment (I stayed in a spare room in Martin's apartment) to see flakes of snow floating down from the sky, an almost unheard of event in Shanghai. So I dug my gloves and scarf out of the bottom of my bag. But this wasn't enough! It turns out that most of the buildings in Shanghai have only air-conditioners for heating, which can blow warm air as well as cold. So that makes the air nice and warm, but leaving the office in evening I found that my bag was still cold from the morning walk to work. The corridors and toilets were likewise unheated, so a trip to the bathroom resembled an arctic expedition. A day or so after I left, temperatures returned to normal, back to ~15 degrees again.

We ate extremely well indeed. Luckily Martin's friend Ye was ready to accompany us to restaurants near the University, where there were was in general no English menu and no-one who spoke English. It's exactly as I'd heard; there is an incredible diversity in Chinese food which from the west is hardly apparent at all. Like Italian food, there is a great many different dishes from different regions of China which is almost unknown in the west, where it's essentially Cantonese food we eat. We ate a lot of Szechuan meals, returning at least twice or three times to two restaurants near the University. The best dishes were very spicy but not overwhelmingly so -- the flavor of the dish was not completely overwhelmed by tons of chilli peppers. Normally we were the last people to eat; most people eat early in Shanghai, at around 7-8pm. In most cases there was perhaps only one or two other tables occupied. In one restaurant we lingered perhaps too long and the waitress brought us the bill, without us asking for it, but then fair enough, it was late... as we left, we saw the entire staff of restaurant trooping up the stairs to the restaurant's upstairs tables, carrying steaming woks filled with food -- they were anxious that we should leave so they could eat their dinner themselves.

(These are some guys making dumplings near the Jade Garden part of town...)

One evening, ploughing through I don't know how many bowls of excellent food, I remarked that 'life sure is tough under communism' and indeed from the privileged viewpoint of the centre of Shanghai that certainly seems the case. Most of these restaurants only opened in the last twenty years. But now they are certainly doing well. And while the quality of the food in the expensive foreigner-friendly restaurants in the concession was excellent, one is more than anything paying for the location, the subdued lighting, the attentive service. At the Szechuan resto around the corner looking carefully one evening I found that all the restaurant's cigarette butts had been nonchalantly swept under our table...

Jacques Yonnet and the secret course of the Bievre

2009-10-05T20:53:00.001+02:00

A few weeks ago I finished Jacques Yonnet's excellent "Rue des Maléfices"; an imperfect translation might read "Witchcraft Street". It's probably one of my favourite books I've read in French, although reading it took me a very long time at the text is very opaque. Long passages of the book's dialogue are in 1940's-era parisian argot. Parsing the full meaning demands repeated re-reading. Jacques Yonnet himself, circa 1935, real or disguise you decide:

The arduous trek through obscure lingo is more than worth it. Yonnet's book is essentially a series of short stories (five to ten pages in each case) linked to a particular location in Paris. Yonnet digs down through layers of history in some cases, going back to events that happened in the middle ages to explain events in contemporary paris. Other stories recount events in 1940s and 50s.... The best and most vivid chunk of the book takes place during the occupation.

The stories are wonderful. At the start of the book he explains how rue 1bis rue du Bievre, just a few steps from Notre Dame and the Seine became the tiny patch of grass that it is today, a gap in the street. There is no building there. Well: the building was cursed. He explains in terrifying realistic detail how a gypsy's malediction led to the building's eventual demolition, after the owner lost in quick succession his dog and his wife (the latter of which, were are told, was last seen heading in the direction of the Seine with man who was known to own a boat).

Most of the scenes in the book take place near to Rue Mouffetard, which in the book is called La Mouffe. Yonnet's character (who is actually Yonnet? I've not been able to make up how much of the book is real...) spends a fair amount of at the bar "Au vieux chene" on the rue Mouffetard, where he meets all kinds of interesting people. In one scene our heroes examine in detail a map of Paris to understand why bad things happen at the particular street they happen at. The explanation is what Iain Sinclair would called a "psychogeographic" one and is intimately linked with how the streets lie in relationship to each other and the Seine.

Of course all these events happen not so far from where I live and work. In one scene very close to the book's obscure core our hero is taken to a zone beyond his knowledge but one that I know quite well; south of boulevard Arago. After squeezing through a centimetre-wide gap between two buildings and jumping over a narrow fetid stream to reach an apartment window Mr. Yonnet's character realises that there is still a tiny bit of the river Bievre open to the sky. This grimy stream is the Bievre, Paris' other river, whose course today is completely beneath ground. It is actually what bisects the subterranean carrieres of the 13th and 14th arrondissements in two, and prevents any cataphiles from making an underground passage from Luxembourg to Tolbiac. And in the apartment is - well ... I invite all you to read the book...

The Bievre, in the offical canon, was closed and covered at the beginning of the century. A few weekends ago, for the "Journee du Patrimoine" I visited an interesting building called "La Chateau Blanche" -- this was the house of the Flemish man Jean Gobelin, who gave his name to that part of Paris. The Bievre passed nearby, in fact it was essential for a lot of the local master-crafstfmen who used its waters for processing linen for rugs and carpets.

That street you see at the end of the photograph is actually the Boulevard Arago! I understand a bit better now why there were breweries underground the boulevard Arago at the beginning of the 20th century -- such a source of fine, pure water would be ideal for making beer. Today, the Bievre ends is course in the sewers of Paris, although periodically people talk about opening it to the air again. Such schemes are invariably shelved after someone figures out the horrendous cost of purifying the water enough so that living creatures could come close to it. So it stays underground...

Deep underground, looking outwards.

2009-08-10T22:57:00.001+02:00

Characters in Haruki Murakami's novels tend to spend a lot of time at the bottom of deep, dark wells or in the depths of forests. After a lot of staring into darkness they usually discover that what they thought was a wall really is in fact a door leading somewhere else. I thought a bit about this the other day when I was at the "Luxembourg" train station here in Paris to see the astronomical images that my friend Mr. Seagull has prepared as part of an underground exhibition which will last six months. (Attentive readers will recognise Mr. Seagull as a regular commentator on this column). Six enormous images have been affixed to the cavernous walls of the Luxembourg metro station, printed out using a special process which can make bright coloured images which can last six months in an environment as hostile as a Parisian metro station where hundreds of thousands of people pass every day.

The images, which are really doors of course, lead further and further out into the Universe, starting out with the rocky Martian landscape seen by the JPL rovers and finishing up with a swathe of the distant Universe as it was seven billion years ago as imaged by the MEGACAM camera on the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope on the island of Hawaii. The image was processed by computers of the TERAPIX project -- also underground, in the basement of the IAP. A kilometre or so south of this platform.

Standing next to the images I could see the ancient light dissolve into pixels. I took a few pictures from the other side of the platform. Here is one -- but you should go yourself. Or pay careful attention as you pass through the station. Historians of Paris will know that it's only very recently that one could actually travel through the Luxembourg station. For greater part of the station's hundred and ten year history it was actually the terminus, the last station on the ligne de Sceaux. That north end of the tunnel was a wall. Now it too leads somewhere else...

leaving Hiroshima and Miyajima

2009-06-16T16:20:00.001+02:00

This time I'm on the misty blue waters of the Inland sea, on a ferry between Hiroshima and Matsuyama. My conference starts tomorrow. To the left and to the right of me are many small forested islands; ahead in the distance on the horizon I can see a vague outline of coastline.

I've just spent on day in Hiroshima and one day exploring the Island of Miyajima. Miyajamia is famous for the beautiful red torii of Itsukushima shrine and Hiroshima is famous for -- well, you know what Hiroshima is famous for.

I visited the area around the Peace Park, where the monuments and museums are, the afternoon that I arrived from Kanzawa. My hotel's sole virtue was that it was very close to the Peace Park, but it was a much less interesting place than those "minshuku" that I stayed at in Kanzawa and Nikko.

The museum in the Peace Park documents in a fairly balanced way the events which lead to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; there were a lot worse things which could be said about why the allies decided to destroy a Japanese city as opposed to a German one which were left unsaid.

The museum has a large collection of artefacts recovered from the city, lunch boxes with the remains of carbonised food inside, watches stopped at the exact instant of the bombing. For each of these items, their story is detailed, the human life that was extinguished with the object. The effects of the bomb were described in unflinching detail. Only five photographs were ever taken in the city on the day of the bombing, I learned, by a journalist who entered the city that afternoon. He could only take those five photographs before he was overcome by emotion and horror, paralysed by the apocalyptic sight before him.

I spent a few hours in the museum, listened to all the audio commentary, looked at all the exhibits. Then I left for the park and walked to the cenotaph in the centre of the park. Standing before the memorial for the victims of the explosion, a curving, undulating arch, one sees in a direct line under the arch the burning flame, the flame that was lit that day in August in 1945, and beyond that charred structure of the "A-bomb dome", one of the few buildings left standing after the explosion. It was only at that instant that I realised, fully, that those events described in the museum didn't happen in some abstract place far away. They happened here, on the ground I was standing on.

Some comments I've read try to contextualise the deaths in Hiroshima by saying, for example, that one one night of bombing in Tokyo many more people lost their lives. But in Hiroshima so many people died in the instant the bomb exploded. 70,000. In five seconds every building with a kilometre of the fireball were annihilated. Such terrible destructive power had never been seen before.

At the same time, horribly, it was treated as a scientific experiment. In the instant before the bomb was dropped, people reported seeing several small white parachutes falling from the Enola Gay. These were in fact radio transmitter probes designed to measure the atmospheric pressure in the vicinity of the bomb site. After Hiroshima had been selected as a target for a possible atomic bombing, no conventional bombing was carried out over the city so that the effects of atomic bombing could be better understood.

Hiroshima, thankfully, bears the weight of it's terrible history very lightly. A beautiful warm ocean breeze permeates the city, and the evening the streets are buzzing with life and activity. I ate in two fine "okonomiyaki" restaurants both evenings I was there, a local speciality comprising many vegetables and seafood fried on a hot-plate before the customers. I am sure people ate okonomiyaki in Hiroshima on that day in August, too.

"For people who cannot go back home..."

2009-06-10T14:46:00.001+02:00

I'm in transit, between Nikko, celebrated pilgrim town, and Kanazawa, a town on the coast of the sea of Japan. The ocean has just became visible, a foggy band of water only dimly visible a few meters from the train tracks through thick grey cloud. I should arrive in Kanazawa in an hour or two.

I've been here in Japan since Saturday, and I'm on my way to Matsuayama for a conference -- I'm taking the slow route, although trains in Japan are not that slow at all. Today is Tuesday, and I plan to be there on Sunday. My three days in Tokyo were exhausting, probably because I walked too much. On the first day I saw this sign--

To which I immediately attached a profound metaphysical significance. "You can't go home again", after all! These Japanese look after everything, even existential angst! Well, alright: I suspected it was a circumlocution for "homeless people". But, in fact, none of the above: these shelters are really for salarymen who've missed their last train home.

I'm still on the misty coast of the sea of Japan. On the left I can see some snow-capped mountains behind a blue-grey mist and on the right, the ocean and many houses with black sloping rooves, wet with rain. It does look like it rains a lot here. The umbrella I bought on my first day in Asakusa will be useful around here.

My arrival in Tokyo was slightly surreal, as perhaps are all arrivals in unknown countries after long-haul flights. After descending through the clouds, absolutely nothing was visible until a few seconds before landing: Tokyo was shrouded a thick fog, and heavy rain was falling. I found my way easily enough to my hotel in Asakusa, but as it was only 9AM I couldn't take a shower or readjust to the changing of continents. So I visited, in the pouring rain, Asakusa's main attraction, the Senso-Ji buddhist temple. It was still early, and the crowds had yet to arrive, and I spent the good part of an hour wandering around the temple and the yet-to-be filled streets until exhaustion and rain overcame me. Remember, it was really around 3AM for me, and I had not slept in 24 hours. I decided to find somewhere warm to pass an hour or two until I could check in.

After time spent elsewhere in Asia (Iran and China) I had forgotten that actually the Japanese do know how to make a good coffee, and I found one such coffee-house where an extremely hot cup of coffee was prepared from beans for me before my eyes, which gave me just enough energy to keep going until 3pm.

I don't have much else to report concerning my stay in Tokyo. After reading about the various districts of the town in my guidebook I had perhaps an exaggerated sense of the differences between them. My invariable reaction when stepping from the subway station was to think, actually, this looks very similar to all the places in Tokyo I have seen before. In the end, Asakusa, where my hotel was located, turned out to be the part of town I preferred. There I found everything on a more or less on a human scale, at least in the narrow streets around my hotel, where there were many fine restaurants and bars. Walking around Shinjuku was a bit like constantly watching television outside, so much is moving and changing. At certain intersections this is literally true: giant tv screens have been placed at major intersections, and everyone's eyes drift skywards whilst waiting for the light to change so they can cross. And also there is a constant aural background of dozens of small voices speaking to you simultaneously in a language you don't understand. There are I don't know how many hidden loudspeakers in the metro system and visits to department stores and pachinko hall can be an overwhelming experience.

[a few hours later]. I'm now in Kanazawa. I'll perhaps write more in the next few days as I continue down the coast.

Visiting Illycaffe, Trieste

2009-04-18T23:13:00.001+02:00

In December I made a short visit to Trieste, Italy, where I was invited to give a seminar at the Trieste Observatory. Fantastic hospitality! I ate extremely well and was excellently looked after. Here's a short account of what happened....

For espresso drinkers, Trieste is indelibly associated with the name of Illy. It was in Trieste that Illy created the first espresso machine, the Iletta, and Illy coffee beans is the only Italian espresso of high quality that is available throughout the world, thanks to the Illy method of packing the coffee beans with a neutral atmosphere under pressure. So I was amazed to discover, a few months previously, that the brother of my host was highly placed in the Illy coffee hierarchy and a seminar in Trieste seemed an ideal occasion to arrange for a visit to the Illy factory.

After my arrival, and an excellent meal near the observatory, at 3pm we drove to the Illy factory near the Trieste docks. It's there, for almost a hundred years, that green beans have arrived from remote corners of the world to Illy's factory. Crossing the port of Trieste we could see in the middle distance, on the hillside, a very tall chimney. This, I was told, was the chimney of the Illy coffee factory. The chimney is of such a great height so that only the freshest possible air is used in the roasting process; it's actually an air intake, rather than an exhaust.

At Illy we were outfitted with visitor tags and of course the tour started with an excellent espresso! At the centre of the reception area is a gleaming bar where free cups of excellent espresso are served to anyone who asks. Here, where espresso was invented, one might regard this cup as the definitive version. I took an espresso with my friends and we talked to the bartender. It was indeed an excellent espresso; I realised now to what level I have to strive each afternoon at the IAP when I prepare espresso for my friends.

Our tour of the factory lasted over two hours, in the main part because myself and my colleagues were very inquisitive. Our tour started with the coffee bean selection process. We were led into a narrow glass-fronted room which overlooked what I can only describe as a waterfall of green coffee beans, a vast avalanche of coffee grains. Here the crucial selection process took place: the reflected light from each coffee bean is carefully examined and if it does not fall within a carefully pre-determined spectrum pffttt! it is ejected with a blast of compressed air. A few other coffee beans are naturally taken out with it but no matter: one bad coffee bean, we are told, is enough to spoil an entire cup of espresso.

After selection, the coffee beans are roasted and then travel in pipes propelled by compressed air to the packaging plant. Walking over there I stood amidst countless machines that relentlessly filled one coffee tin after another with Illy coffee beans and then carefully pressurised the tin with neutral gases. I realised that every single tin of Illy coffee in the entire world came from this factory: there is no other production facility. Illy also make their own tins, which are tested to make sure they don't explode under pressure an automated process which which we witnessed (and were I nervously awaited an extremely large bang.) Throughout the shop floor I saw espresso machine after espresso machine: at each stage of the packaging process espresso coffee is regularly brewed and tasted (how do these people sleep at night?) to make sure that only the highest-quality product is shipped.

The most wondrous place, however, was the Illy coffee laboratory. Here it was explained to us how Illy selects the coffee beans which will be used in their espresso blend. When a sample of coffee beans arrive at the factory, they are first examined under the microscope, to make certain they have the correct colour and shape. Okay. But the next step I found quite amazing. Illy scientists make measurements of each coffee bean using a near-infrared spectrometer. Our guide pulled out a thick binder showing the results of such tests. I was amazed. These plots were what I as an astronomer would recognise as a colour-colour diagram; each axis shows the difference between two adjacent spectral filters. If an astronomer wants to find a distant galaxy, he looks for objects which fall into a particular region of colour-colour space. Galaxies at redshift of around three are here, lower-redshift galaxies are there. But at Illy, they carried out exactly the same experiment! Good coffee beans lurked in this region of colour-colour space, bad coffee beans in this one! I had always suspected that astronomy and espresso were intimately connected, but now I had proof.

We left the factory and returned to the observatory just as the winter light was fading. I worked for further hour or two at the observatory before leaving to eat an evening meal with my colleagues. The next morning, climbing up the hillside to the observatory before my talk, I made an interesting discovery.... I knew that Jimmy Joyce had lived in Trieste but I had not realised it was so close to the observatory...and, wasn't that someone's washing hanging out just next door?

I remembered Flan O'Brien's hilarious Dalkey Archive, in which James Joyce has a double career stitching Jesuit underwear...

Postscript: In Imam Khomeni airport in the middle of the night...

2008-11-25T20:02:00.001+01:00

I've now returned to Paris (since around one week now; I had to leave once again last weekend for a short trip to Italy). My flight to Paris left Imam Khomenei airport at the incredible time of 6.45AM. I arrived on my connecting flight from Shiraz at around midnight.

Iranian domestic flights are almost completely filled with business travellers; our aeroplane between Shiraz and Tehran was a narrow-bodied Fokker aircraft (I don't think I have ever flew in one of those before) and within an hour we had touched down at the Mehrabad airport, Tehran. I left the terminal building, picked up my bag which I'd left there one week previously, and looked for a taxi driver to take me to Khomeni airport. I prudently (or so I thought) went to the main taxi stand outside the airport where I was in some mysterious fashion allocated a driver. The other drivers pointed at me and pointed at my driver, a young man who spoke loudly with all the other drivers. He led me to his car which was unmarked -- nothing too unusual in Iran -- but I did notice that he had small model car stuck to the dashboard. A racing car?

It was now after midnight, and Tehran traffic had calmed a little although there was still a lot of cars on the road. Within minutes of leaving the airport I knew what kind of taxi ride I was in for -- a very hair-raising one, even by Tehran standards. My driver overtook every single car in our path. I thought of Marc's taxi driver who tried to reassure him by exclaiming "I am champion of Tehran rally!" I think I was frightened for the first time in a taxi in Tehran. I saw we were doing perhaps 120, 140km/hr, and in Tehran's narrow crowded roads, that is a lot. At one point I saw my driver produce a very thick wad of Rials from a shirt pocket, grip the steering wheel with his legs, and start to count the bills, one by one. I touched his shoulder and suggested that he perhaps continue his calculations at a later time.

Within twenty (very long) minutes we had arrived on the edge of the desert, at Khomenei airport. I didn't know quite what to expect, but IKA (as it is known by the international three word abbreviations) was bursting to the seams. It was around one in the morning and my flight did not depart for another six hours. I expected the airport to be empty. Instead, it was full. After walking around the crowded concourses for half an hour I could find no place where I could sit down in peace and quiet and (perhaps) work away on my laptop

In time-honoured travelling astronomer fashion I scanned the skirting boards for power sockets but without success. In the end I found one, at the other end of the terminal, underneath the stairs near to a very small cafe. In the entire aiport there was exactly one publically accessible power socket! Okay! Perhaps I can work here and write away on my laptop. I ordered a tea (no coffee in Iran, remember) and sat down down, thinking of the long hours ahead of me. But my chair was too far forward! I reached to move the seat, sat down --and when I next saw my hand I was amazed to see a large amount of blood welling from my finger. I had managed to chop off half of my fingernail as my seat cover was not actually affixed to my seat. Ouch! I showed my bleeding finger accusingly to the cafe-owner, who became immediately apologetic; a friend of his arrived and I packed up my computer with one hand and was taken to the first-aid station at the airport, at the other end of the concourse. Through the teeming crowds.

At IKA first aid a man with a very large pair of scissors cut off my hanging fingernail, bandaged my hand, sent me back to the bar, where they offered me drinks. And hour had passed! But it was still only 2AM in the morning, and now with my bandaged hand I certainly couldn't type any more. It was still not time to check in. I went to change what little Rials I had left and was amazed to see Iranians in the other money-changing queue (reserved for Iranians) with enormous bundles of money -- this I guessed were savings of many years which were being converted into dollars.

Now it was time to check in. I noticed idly that a check-in desk not too far to where I was standing offered me the possibility of a flight to Kabul. From the other side of the concourse, where the arrivals area was, I could hear the sound of a marching band, and I went to investigate. A large crowd has assembled in the baggage area, complete with red carpet and banners. Patriotic music was being played, which seemed slightly sinister to me. What was going on here? It was, somewhere explained to me, the returning Iranian volleyball team. A lot of people had come to IKA in the middle of the night to see them.

After check-in perhaps the longest ritual of the entire night: between 3AM and 4AM I stood in the line-up for passport control. There seemed to be one official carefully examining every single passport of every single person who was not Iranian and who wished to leave Iran; it was interminably slow. On the other side of the check-in counter I had noticed a large group of people in curious attire: all the men and women were dressed in brightly-coloured muslin dresses. I saw they we all traveling to Mumbai; the small dark lady of perhaps fifty years of age in front in the glacially slow-moving passport queue was part of this group and we started to talk.

"We are Zoroastrians" she explained to me. "We are here on a pilgrimage to Yadz." She spoke perfect English with a faint British accent. She turned out to be one of the most intelligent and charming people I've ever met. She lived in Pune, which I knew from my travels to IUCAA. "So what does one do if one is a Zoroastrian?" I asked her. Zorastrianism, I remembered now, was the official religion of the Achaemenids. Unfortunately, all the Zoroastrian texts were destroyed when Persepolis was burned. She explained excitedly, "There are so many prayers, so many prayers!" A lot of complicated rituals. The dress that you wear, the dresses that I saw people wearing in the dress that is yours for life. The pockets of this dress have ritual and mystical significance. The pocket at the back represents the weight you carry for your entire life. But her flight was close to departing, so I gave up my place in the passport line to her; she disappeared into the crowds heading for the flight for Mumbai.

AFter passport control, the rest of my flight was uneventful; there were no vast crowds of people here. I certainly got the impression that IKA only half (perhaps less) of the people there were actually taking an aeroplane.

I arrived in Paris early in the morning. I took the bus from the airport and walked the streets to my apartment. It was cold and damp and my clothes were not warm enough. The capital seemed deserted, empty: after Tehran, Paris seemed like a small country town. The traffic was calm and unhurried and there seemed to be no-one in the streets. I saw for the first time in two weeks women walking the pavements with their hair uncovered. I looked for the first time at the perfume advertisements which are everywhere in Paris and saw bare shoulders and long legs. How was this possible? I felt a little perturbed; even though winter was approaching I felt a little hint of spring in the sensation that here people could wear what ever they wanted to wear without risk of official censure. I saw Paris differently now. I was happy to return home.

Persepolis and other ruined cities

2008-10-26T23:19:00.001+01:00

I've left Tehran behind for three days to visit Shiraz. I arrived two nights ago, and will leave for Tehran and Paris tomorrow night (my flight schedule is the most 'interesting' I've had for a long time; I have to wait from around midnight -- when I arrive from Shiraz -- to 06:45, for my flight departure for Paris. I'm not sure yet how I will occupy myself at Khomeini airport in the middle of the night).

My main motivation in coming to Shiraz was to visit Persepolis, as well as the other archaeological sites. For the last two days I hired a car and driver and we covered several hundred kilometers across the desert visiting ancient ruins. Some of these sites were indeed extremely ancient, almost three thousand years old.

But how to describe Persepolis itself? I will try. The scale of the site is overwhelming; I spent almost three hours there and took over one hundred photographs. It is easily comparable in extent to the Foro Romano, the ruins of ancient Rome at the center of the Italian capital -- but it is several hundred years older.

The entire city is built on a terraced plateau, which one reaches by climbing a monumental staircase. The steps are shallow, we are told, so that visiting dignitaries could mount them gracefully in their flowing robes. At the top, one passes between two enormous slabs which have been sculpted with beautiful bas-reliefs. Incongruously, at eye level, the stones have been covered with a range of graffitis from late 19th century and early 20th century explorers. I noticed at least one "count" something or other, a Gentleman Explorer for sure, and I tried to imagine what his trip to Persepolis must have been like and what the city would have looked like with many important monuments still hidden under sand.

On the terrace there are many ruined palaces to visit, as well as the famous Apadana staircase, one half of which whose bas-reliefs are much better preserved than the other because they passed the centuries under the sands. Serried ranks of princes and kings pay tribute, for eternity, to king of the Achaemenids.

One palace, known as 'Hadish' near the corner of the complex intrigued me. I had arrived very early, at around 08.30, and there was no-one else at this corner of the ancient city apart from a bored security guard. In this palace, all had been destroyed except the frames of a door and window. On the ground one could see the stone stumps of many columns. The window frame must have been at least a meter in thickness. I looked out across an expanse of semi-arid desert, a small stand of trees in the near distance. The sun shone from a faultless blue sky as it probably had done 2,500 years ago. It was here in this palace, some say, that the fire was started by Persepolis' conquerors -- Alexander the great -- which destroyed the city. The fire was fueled by the wooden columns supporting the roof, either accidentally in a drunken party (this is before the Islamic Republic, remember) or deliberately in retaliation for the destruction of Athens by Xerxes.

Three hours had passed, and I returned to the car and took tea with Ari, my driver, on the ground near our car under the shade of some trees. Throughout the morning I had had a constant, throbbing headache which I realised was the symptoms of caffein withdrawal -- I had dared to leave my coffee maker in my bag at the left luggage at Mehrabad airport. I was extremely grateful for the tea. (Incredibly, it's now three days since I have had coffee; thankfully, the headaches passed after the first day). Ari had worked for years in hospitals in Shiraz and very scrupulous when it came to hygine, carefully labeling our respective tea mugs. He had also studied a great deal of history, and he tried to answer my many questions.

There was still more to see. After tea, we drove six kilometers to the necropolis, the burial grounds for Achaemenid kings. From the distance, I saw a long ridge of mountains and I thought to myself, after spending a morning looking at bas-reliefs: "those look like monuments." As we cam closer I realised they were monuments; hewn into the side of the mountain were four enormous tombs, tens of meters high, cross-shaped, with bas-reliefs below. These were the resting places of Darius II, Artaxerxes, Darius I and Xerxes I whose bones were placed in these chambers after the vultures had picked them clean. One bas relief was blank; asking Ari he told me that in fact this bas relief had been planned to commemorate a victory never happened.

Our last destination was Pasagarde, where the tomb of Cyrus the Great stands in a desolate windswept plain. Centuries ago it was surrounded by a walled garden, but everything was destroyed by Alexander's invading armies. A few hundred meters away are the ruins of his palace; incredibly one column is still standing and written on it, near the top, in cuneform script, are the words "I am Cyrus, the Achaemenid king".

Although this inscription is not particularly hubristic, leaving Pasargade and reflecting on what I had seen throughout the day I was more than a little reminded of Shelly and the ruined statute of his king Ozymandias, staring out across the desert on his vanished empire, where, today, "nothing beside remains."

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Iran, Persepolis

Visiting Khomeini's Tomb (Oct. 17th)

2008-10-25T19:32:00.001+02:00

Today is a Friday, which means that it's a holiday in Iran; Thursday and Friday are the equivalent of Saturday and Sunday back in Europe. It's strange how the different religions around the world have chosen different days of the week for their holidays: Muslims on Friday, Jews on Saturday and Christians on Sunday.

In any case, I had decided that today I wouldn't go to the IPM and I would let the students get on with their projects. They had a fair idea, I hoped, of how to continue with their projects without me. So with my colleague Marc (also here to teach at the school) we took the Tehran metro south to the very last station, the Tomb of Imam Khomeini.

It took almost an hour to ge there. Our train passed above ground, and we travelled through kilometers of long low buildings which spread out from Tehran and into the cities around it. Leaving the metro station, a dry desert heat rolled over us, and with each breath I could sense the moisture evaporating from my throat, not something I could not remember experiencing since I had been in the deserts of New Mexico. It was the end of October: I couldn't imagine what it would be like to come here at the height of summer.

In front of us, under the burning desert sun, stretched a large open square; beyond, were the unfinished dome and minarets of the mausoleum where Khomeini's tomb lay. Around us, in the distance, we could see a few trees, a road or two, but nothing more: we were really on the edge of the desert. Families, men, children, black-clad women, passed by us returning from the shrine, and under the nearby trees we could see many tents, some with families. The immense open spaces around the made the place feel strangely empty, even though there was a fair amount of people. I realised that for the first time in ten days, thanks to the twenty kilometers separating us from Tehran, I could no long hear the sound of traffic, and I felt oddly relaxed and calm.

We walked a few hundred meters under the arcaded passageways until we reached the entrance to the shrine, taking off our shoes as we went in. Inside, I was surprised how confined it seemed; the walls were covered by blue plastic sheeting and the ceiling reminded me oddly of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, full of exposed pipes and wires. Six green concrete columns surrounded the shrine. To the right and the left were other large unpainted concrete columns. The floors were covered with carpets where many people were praying. In the middle was the shrine itself; a glass box with a white metal grid and a green carpeted roof. The faithful pressed their hands against the metal and muttered a few prayers. To one side, a separate side of the box was reserved for women. I realised that, completely hidden from view, behind the blue plastic sheeting and directly overhead was the unfinished skeleton structure of the shrine's central dome.

We spent around fifteen or twenty minutes sitting on the carpets before the shrine. "Before the man who had made the west tremble" as my friend remarked. In the shrine, the atmosphere was strangely flat; it was not crowded, and I heard no wailing passionate professions of faith. We left, put our shoes back on and stepped back into the desert sun.

Once outside again, we visited vast the inner courtyards of the shrine which were completely deserted apart from a few workmen. There were certainly no tourists other than us! To the north, listening carefully, we could hear traffic on the motorway rushing towards the airport. Above, a crane made a fifth minaret next to the skeleton of the shrine's unfinished dome. We had seen all that there was to see, and we returned towards the metro.

Today at the University, when I told the students where we had been, no-one could understand why we had gone there. "You went where"? they all asked us with an air of incredulity. Most of them had only been there on school trips, if they had been at all. Well, you know, I replied, Khomeini was such a important and influential figure in the politics of the 20th century. I was surprised to have tell this to an Iranian! Someone who casts a long shadow over Iran and someone who shaped in a very profound way Iran's relationship with the west. For us, from the West, Khomeini was for decades someone indelibly associated with Iran. "And do you have tombs like that in the west?" one of them asked me. Well, the only thing I could think of was the tomb of Napoleon at Les Invalides; an enormous marble coffin seemingly half the size of the golden dome of les Invalides. Hubristic. "But that was two hundred years ago", was the indignant response. And I must agree that "Les Invalides" is nothing beside this enormous structure on the edge of the desert.

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Iran

In Tehran (Oct. 14th)

2008-10-24T21:21:00.001+02:00

My first full day in Tehran I spent at the offices of the Iranian National Observatory ... Project. Project, because the observatory does not exist yet. The building itself has just been constructed, and people have moved there only a few weeks ago; arriving at the front door I was greeting by a paint-stained astronomer, and I almost half expected to be asked to help out with the building work. The building is even further north than the guest house, in a hilly wooded area at the end of a long dirt track. The building grounds were taken from the Shah after the revolution, like so much of the land now belonging to the IPM (The institute for physics and mathematics).

But ... Tehran? Although the area around the guest house is filled with expensive and modern apartment blocks, the dramatic backdrop of dry desert mountains and the black-clad women crossing the street made it clear to me, leaving the IPM that morning, that this was not a European city. I admit that I was perhaps just a little apprehensive when I was first invited to a workshop in Iran, almost three years ago; that trip never happened because of Ahmadinejad's election and a subsequent mass resignation of University staff. With the exception of the traffic, however, Iran seemed to me one of the most unthreatening places I have ever visited. But what did people really think?

We had lunch at large table in the INO gardens. I ate a delicious kebab with rice (which I would soon become very familiar with) and a very interesting yoghurt drink. We admired the large blackboard extending all along the outside wall of the building, perfect for those long difficult equations but perhaps less useful for an observational astronomer. Perhaps a clear giveaway that the institute's director is a theoretical cosmologist.

Everyone was talking about Ahmadinejad's television appearance the previous evening. In fact, his face was the first I saw on an Iranian television set: arriving late at night at the IPM guest house I found the guards at the gate house intently watching the presidential broadcast. At the lunch table, although I don't speak Farsi, it was clear from the tone of the conversation that Ahmadinejad's pronouncements were not taken very seriously. They also told me that there was a certain apprehension each time one of these television appearance was scheduled -- who knows what ridiculous pronouncement would be made which would damage even further Iran's standing in the outside world?

I thought of Viktor Strum, nuclear physicist living in totalitarian Russia in Vassily Grossman's epic 'Life and Fate' which I had just finished reading, and I even went so far to tell a little of his story to those at the dinner table. Thankfully however the parallels with that epoch and today in Iran are slender. "We can say anything we want here" affirmed one of the physicists at the dinner table, "it's just not so certain anyone will pay any attention to us."

Lunch was over, and returned to my computer to continue preparing the course which I would have to give in a few days.

Arriving in Tehran - in the taxi!

2008-10-12T21:11:00.001+02:00

The cavernous Imam Khomeini airport seemed almost deserted. I disembarked from the plane, retrieved my bag and passed through customs control without incident. But I had a lingering doubt in my mind -- would there be someone to meet me at the airport? I had been told by the astronomer who had invited me that there would, but the secretary who booked my flight never mentioned this to me. There would be someone there, right? I had no map; "Google maps" for Tehran shows the intricate, sprawling mess of Tehrani streets as a single crossroads. No data.

In the end I need not have worried. As soon I left the baggage area I was met by a smiling pot-bellied man holding up a big card with 'Dr. McCracken' written on it in 40-point type. This was my driver to the institute. Hello welcome! Where are you from? Well, I am from Ireland, but I live in Paris. Ireland! I worked in England for two months, in London, with my brother. (We were walking down the echoing empty halls of IKA. We took the lift. My driver talking into his mobile phone. He passes me his mobile phone.) Here is my brother, Amir, he says, I speak to the voice on the telephone: Hello! How are you? Are you in London? No, I am in Tehran. We can meet! My brother will give you my number, he says. Nice to speak to you, I reply. Thank you! I hand back the mobile phone. These people like to speak -- and to speak to foreigners!

In the taxi, we rolled through a maze of empty roads and autoroutes in the middle of what as far as I could tell was open desert. Through the window, I saw a lone planet and the moon's pale disk low on the horizon following our taxi faithfully towards the city. It was around ten o'clock in the evening.

By ten thirty, soon after I had seen the first few buildings of Tehran, we had stopped: gridlock. Our taxi idled in heavy fumes of very incompletely combusted petroleum products, and I reluctantly rolled up my window, because the night air was pleasantly warm. I was beginning to get an inkling of Tehrani traffic. Beyond the cars I could see a maze of buildings most of which seemed to have been built in the last fifty years or so, but even so there was still that wonderful feeling of strangeness that always comes after an aeroplane flight to a country you have never been to before. In only five hours, everything changes.

After another half an hour or so, a gleaming, glittering tower appeared on the horizon. From a disk near the gracefully tapering peak needles of light shone and flickered. Was this the Iranian Tour Eiffel? My taxi driver became more and more exited. Very nice, very nice, beautiful, he muttered to himself repeatedly under his breath, all the while craning his neck to see the tower, like an excited child approaching the north pole just before Christmas. There is a very big party there tonight, he told me. Tonight is opening night. Then I realised we were actually driving right towards the tower. We passed the security barrier, drove to the foot of this immense luminous tower. Here is my brother! my driver exclaimed. I shook hands with small man in a dark suit. Hello! I said, Nice to meet you. I won't take up your time, he told me. Welcome. If you need to contact me, here is my card. Have you eaten? He will take you to a restaurant. I thanked him, but I wanted to see my bed before my dinner. And we left the tower, and in an another half an hour I had arrived at the IPM.

Arriving in Tehran - In the aeroplane

2008-10-12T20:13:00.001+02:00

I'm now a good five thousand kilometers to the east of Paris, in the Iranian capital city, Tehran. Tehran! I am here to teach at a school in observational astronomy. The Iranians have ambitions to build a three-metre class telescope, but almost no-one here has any experience with real data; most astronomy in either the hard-maths variety of theoretical cosmology or observations of nearby stars using detectors at least a generation out of date. So a change of culture is needed, really; modern observational astronomy with modern detectors and modern data reduction software. And no matter there is no telescopes just yet: there are gigabytes of data freely available over the internet -- the only problem is downloading it. Despite the fact that the IPM (Insitute for Physics and Mathematics, where the school is being held) has amongst the fastest network connection in the country, we struggle get above a few hundred kb/second. But then I am used to my office in Paris not far from the centre of Renater, the French networking agency, so I am a bit spoiled. I will be spending almost two weeks in Tehran before flying to Shiraz for a few days.

So that is why I am here, but I didn't talk about how I got here -- at the very comfortable IPM guest house, from where I am writing these words. Well -- by aeroplane of course. Iran Air run a direct flight from Paris Orly to Tehran twice a week. I thought for about two seconds about Nicolas Bouvier and his trip to Tehran from Geneva in his Fiat Tupelino -- but i wanted to arrive this year at least, and I had sadly sold my opel ascona many years ago.

The aircraft cabin seemed modern at first: the plane's age was revealed by an ancient in-flight entertainment system. I was reassured by the presence of it seemed at least half a dozen airline pilots in the seats in front of me. I felt strangely relieved that there was no useless in-flight magazine that I would waste my time idly flipping through. I watched attentively (at first) the in-flight film, in Farsi with English subtitles, but as the flight wore on it became harder and harder to follow. (After the extremely tedious 'man from London' by Bela Tarr which I subjected Marie-Laure to last weekend I felt I could sit through anything). It seemed to be the story of a young girl, a psychology student, who works with old people and who becomes intrigued by the painting of a veiled woman who may or may not be connected with one of her patients. The film shows many broad tree-lined boulevards, elegant buildings and also features a lot of driving (something normal in Tehran -- as I am sure I will describe in the next few days). Noticing the odd colour cast of the film (surely a feature of the in-flight entertainment system), the cars that most people seemed to be driving and all the chunky cream-coloured plastic telephones everyone used, I was convinced that the 'action' of the film took place sometime in the 1970s -- until an e-mail address was exchanged, and I realized that we were really some time in the last decade or so. But -- as I said -- my attention wandered. This I realised was partly because of the English translations (and partly because of the extremely wooden acting), which seemed to be almost transliterations more than translations. Given the very different word order in Farsi, almost everyone spoke like they were reciting lines of poems, with the subject buried at the end of each sentence. But very soon after we arrived in Tehran, at the Imam Khomeini Airport.

Descending beneath Paris: second part, at minus 25

2008-09-14T19:07:00.002+02:00

The first impressions deep underground are always the same: it's damp, cold and dark. Wellington boots are an essential element of clothing. The tunnels are very close to the level of the water table, and flooding is frequent. In certain tunnels the water level can easily reach waist level, although thankfully we avoided those. The water is a silty white colour, full of limestone dust.

But passing through the hole, further into the tunnel, you should pause and look around: the surface of the walls are smooth and well-preserved. Here, we were at almost the southern limit of this particular segment of the network, and we would have several kilometers to march before we got to where we wanted to be -- near Denfert Rochereau, underneath my house, near the Observatory.

The underground passageways for the most part follow faithfully the above-ground streets, as a consequence of an arcane part of French law: anyone who owns a bit of land on the surface also owns what is below. So no boring tunnels under other people's houses: the tunnels would have to be where the streets already were. At times, this leads to some strange effects, as the tunnels in places were constructed hundreds of years ago and were given the names of above-ground streets which no longer exist, or which do exist but which changed their names.

We followed one such street, the Avenue D'Orlean, which is now the Avenue du General le Clerc at street level. Walking down the narrow tunnel of course I kept my eyes to the ground but my friend leading us was inspecting carefully every inch of tunnel and ceiling. He showed me an inscription on the wall, some ancient graffiti -- someone had scrawled "la republique ou la mort" -- ancient revolutionary graffiti dating back a century or two. Above ground, everything changes, but down here at minus twenty five metres below, all is frozen preserved, perhaps like astronaut footsteps on the surface of the moon.

We made a tour of a few of the more well known sites in the 14th -- old rooms packed to the ceiling with ancient human bones, student wall murals dating back a few decades, plaques proudly announcing to a public that hasn't been down here for a century or more the names of the engineers who built the walls and tunnels and pillars absolutely essential to keep the new Paris metro disappearing into a large hole. For almost any construction work to be carried out in Paris one of the first things one must do is find out just what is exactly beneath your feet, and build down there, too.

We emerged into the fading evening light after spending around eight hours underground. It is always strange be once more in a world with light and colour where there are trees which move in soft summer breezes and one can hear the distant sounds of the city, birds singing, people talking, cars in the street. All so different from the silent, dark, frozen parallel Paris which we left behind but which remains very close...

Descending beneath Paris: first part, some history

2008-07-20T12:52:00.001+02:00

A few weeks ago I once again descended deep beneath the city, twenty-five meters below ground, to visit the carrieres of Paris. It's my third trip there now, but this time I was in the company of a expert, a specialist in the subject, a man who has made his life's work the study of every kind of man-made tunnel and cave. He is the co-editor of one of the reference works on the subject, and so it was something of a privilege to make this trip. A friend of a friend introduced me to him, and on one fine warm Sunday afternoon we left behind a pleasant Parisian summer afternoon (elegant well-dressed people drinking espressos on terraces, summer sunshine illuminating parks and beautiful broad boulevards, that kind of thing) to descend into the dark and the cold of the Parisian Carrieres.

Some history: there are hundred of kilometers of tunnels here in southern Paris, many of them centuries old. In medieval times, limestone was quarried extensively from deep underground, leaving behind many caves and tunnels. Later, in the 18th century, as the city limits rapidly expanded, suddenly buildings were collapsing, holes opening up in the street. These ancient underground caves had collapsed, the earth had subsided. No-one expected the ground to carry all this weight, after all it was open countryside when they were quarried. This was the origin of the 'inspection des carrieres' (IDC) who joined up all these underground caves and quarries with tunnels, who drew up detailed maps of where everything was. In Paris, the owner of a patch of ground is also the owner of everything down to the level of the carrieres; almost the first operation in any building work here is assessing how solid the ground below actually is -- and reinforcing it if it isn't, which can be expensive.

Over the years, many of the tunnels have been closed off or filled in, but in large part the network still exists, and inspections are still carried out regularly by the IDC- but of course, they are not the only people down there. At one time, almost every public building in Paris boasted a set of staircases going down, an entrance underground; today, most of these entrances have been closed off. But a few still exist...There are manhole covers in the street which go down, but these are for the large part welded shut; but every so often, one will open; some work needs to be done, the manhole cover is opened and ...

There is one way to enter, one way to descend, that has always remained open, more or less. At one time, a railway followed the outskirts of Paris, an outer circle: it was called 'le petit ceinture', or 'little belt'. There are parts of the railway that still exist today, although no passengers have crossed the platforms for perhaps a half-century. In one location, not far from where I write this, a tunnel takes the abandoned railway lines underneath the current tracks of the line four metro. In the middle of this cold, damp tunnel (it is actually underneath the "parc montsouris") there is a hole in the wall -- that hole leads to the carrieres.

Mr. Kaurismaki in Paris; "Juha" at the Cinematheque

2008-07-06T13:12:00.001+02:00

In the past few days I have seen five films directed by Aki Kaurismaki, as well as "The Liar", Mika Kaurismaki's film school project for which Aki wrote the script. Kaurismaki is one of the "guests of honour" at the Paris Cinema festival, and a complete retrospective of all his films are passing the screens of the Reflet Medicis. As well as this, Kaurismaki and a few actors from his films are in town, and have made appearances before a few of the projections. So I will have a chance to catch up on all the films I missed at the Champo retrospective around 18 months ago.

On Thursday night at the Cinematheque there was a screening of "Juha", Kaurismaki's silent movie, and it was accompanied live by the Finnish orchestra who wrote the film's original music. Kaurismaki, Kati Outinen and Andre Wilms were also there, but unfortunately (and this was to be a recurring feature of other projections) no-one really got very much of an opportunity to say anything.

For Kaurismaki to make a silent film was not such a radical departure of course given that (for certain of his films at least) nobody says very much (apparently for the "Match factory girl" all the dialogues were written on little bits of paper at the last possible minute). But a silent film for sure demands a different style of acting than a film graced with live dialogues; as Kaurismaki commented, once the card appears indicating a person's emotional state, after that card disappears from the screen the actor has to display that emotion even more forcefully than before.

"Juha" tells the story of a rural couple who live a peaceful simple existence in the depths of the countryside. Their rural idyll is disrupted by the arrival of stranger (Andre Wilms) in a fast red car, who persuades Juha's wife, Marja (played by Kati Outinen) to run away with him to the city. Needless to say, things end badly for everyone. Tragedy and burlesque. A revolver and an axe.

The live music was not really what I expected; it was kind of rock / jazz fusion, which in the end worked well enough (but then of course live music for a silent movie doesn't have to be some guy with a piano of course). Mr. Kaurismaki made a few laconic comments before the projection, but wouldn't be drawn any more than that.

It's interesting to see so many of Kaurismaki's films one after the other; the final scene of Juha is almost the same as the opening scene of "Shadows in Paradise", filmed around ten years earlier -- the Helsinki municipal rubbish dump. One notices of course that the same group of actors appears in all the films, more or less. That Kaurismaki cameos quite often (twice as a hotel clerk, once as the driver of a hearse in the delirious "Calamari Union"). Last night, watching his "blockbuster" hit, "The man without a past" I noticed in one of the scenes a portrait of Matti Pellonpaa hanging on the wall - Pellonpaa was one of Finland's greatest actors, and starred in many of Kaurismaki's films; he died suddenly in 1995.

Tonight I will go to see the two 'Leningrad Cowboys" movies, concerning the world's worst rock band. You know I could have found out about Kaurismaki about ten years earlier if I had been paying more attention, or had been a little more open; in Manchester in 1991 I remember seeing posters for the "Leningrad Cowboys go America" at the Cornerhouse cinema. I was intrigued. But I was perhaps not too open to new experiences back then; I didn't go to see the film, instead preferring to spend my money to see Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca". Which I had already seen on television in any case. Ah, youth.

On the life of Caravaggio

2008-05-28T23:29:00.001+02:00

One of my Christmas gifts this year was Catherine Puglisi's "Caravaggio". Now I know that Christmas was a long time ago but I just haven't found time to write about this book before. Puglisi's book describes in detail each of Caravaggio's major works, in the order they were painted, whilst at the same time detailing the spectacular and tragic arc of his life. What I appreciated most was that the author's work is factual; wild speculation and pop-psychology analysis are avoided. This would certainly be something all too easy to do with a character like Caravaggio.

My own encounter with Mr. Caravaggio's paintings was unexpected. I had been visiting the Naples observatory, in Capodimonte, and I thought, hey I better go and visit the art gallery next door -- the museum of Capodimonte. I went there very late in the day, the museum was almost empty, I had the place to myself. I wandered through the empty galleries, not knowing what works of art were there -- not knowing that there were three or four paintings of Caravaggio's. Not even knowing who Caravaggio was. It is always most surprising to see his works displayed with other paintings from that epoch; most other painters were searching an elusive idealised beauty, producing paintings removed from the squalid realities of 17th century life in Italy. So when you see his paintings for the first time you think -- these people look like real people! And in fact they were -- Caravaggio drew from life. Girls from the street stood in for the Virgin Mary. Surprisingly, looking at enough of his paintings you will see that these models actually reappear in several different works -- almost as if he's a film director who always uses the same actors. Look closely enough you will see that his apostles' clothes are ripped at the corners. Of course there are the strong chiaroscuro effects, beams of light illuminating chosen sons, tragic figures whose faces are half hidden in shade. It's easy to see why Caravaggio is Martin Scorcese's favorite painter.

Caravaggio's own life was no less shocking -- after numerous brushes with the law, he finally ends up killing a man in duel, although perhaps it was an accident?-- and he flees Rome, heads south, stopping in city after city for year or two at a time, painting and painting. Caravaggio was probably one of the best-paid artists of his time, and he fled Rome at the height of his fame... although he had become successful and famous, he has always this unstable side. He retreats to Malta, he almost becomes a Chevalier, a knight of the order -- but something goes wrong, he's in prison again, he has to run away once more. He returns to Naples, there are always rich people to protect him, he has connections. Then the final act, the abrupt end: Caravaggio tries to return to Rome, but he is arrested en route. His boat continues on northwards without him, containing the paintings he has made as an act of appeasement for Cardinal Borghese. He tries to folllow on foot, he crosses marshy plains -- he catches malaria and dies and is buried in an unmarked grave.

In the boat heading north without Caravaggio is his last painting, drawn for the Cardinal and now hanging in his gallery in Rome. It is "David with the head of Goliath", representing the well known biblical scene, David holding the head of the slain giant. Except in this case, the giant's head is that of Caravaggio's. Caravaggio's final act of atonement?

Reading Puglisi's book and looking at all the paintings one after another what impressed me most was Caravaggio's incredible gift of composition, his ability to place the actors in each scene so as to best tell the story he wanted to tell. It also seems that he worked directly on the canvas, without any preparatory sketches -- at least, none has ever been found. Interestingly enough, X-rays of some of his paintings has revealed that he didn't always find the right solution the first time around; underneath the first layer of paint hidden figures are visible, heads are turned in a slightly different angle.

Strangely enough, Caravaggio had an enormous influence on the painters of his own time, but then he was completely forgotten until the 19th century. Wandering around the Louvre one afternoon I was surprised to stumble into one small room which seemed to be full of Caravaggio paintings I had never seen before. But -- these works were not painted by him at all as I realised in a second, looking at the labels -- they were painted by his imitators.

The lost city of Babylon

2008-04-27T16:26:00.000+02:00

Imagine if you can a city already thousands of years old when Giotto drew the Capanile in Florence; a city already turned to dust millennia before the first foundation stones of Chartres or Notre Dame were laid. Before all of western history started, in fact. That city is the city of Babylon. In the Musee du Louvre, for a few more weeks, the history of Babylon is traced from the distant past to the present days, finishing with the discoveries by German explorers at the end of the 19th century.

The Babylonians were compulsive book-keepers, and recorded everything on clay tablets, baked in the harsh desert sun. It's thanks to this that we know so much about them and their culture. I was a little amazed to discover that even today, among the hundreds of thousand of clay tablets which still exist, quite a few have still to be translated. And of course it is an obvious question to wonder what fraction of the words and text produced today will still be around to be read in 4000 years -- we can hardly read a floppy disk made ten years ago.

There was a lot of material about Babylonian civilisation, their codes of law and the city itself. The Ziggurat in Babylon was confused by many people as perhaps having been the tower of Babel, and one room of the exhibition is dedicated to representations of the Tower in western cultures. It seems the image of the tower is perhaps as widespread as that of San Sebastien and his arrows... Bruegel's tower, I learned, was inspired by a visit to Rome, and in fact bears more than a passing resemblance to the Colosseum.

The second half of the exhibition was concerned with the representation of Babylon in western civilisation. The city, it seems, was all things to all men, depending on the epoch and who was writing the history: either a fabulously opulent city of great wealth and beauty, a place completely corrupt and decadent and worthy of destruction.

I would have liked to have more learned about Babylonian astronomy; they were one of the first if not the first peoples to systematically observe the sky. In one room, a Byzantine russian text was opened to a page showing Babylonian astronomers (in their tower) assiduously observing the sky. But unknown to them, behind them, the hand of god surreptitiously moves the stars in the sky. Indeed!

Visiting Leiden, reading Richard Powers' "The Echo Maker"

2008-04-07T22:39:00.001+02:00

Past:

I am on the train, speeding across the damp level ground of Holland, returning south to Paris. The sky is grey, mist hangs on the few open fields that are visible from the train tracks. This part of Europe is densely populated, cities merge one into the other, a continuum of factories and roads and canals and houses.

This morning in my hotel room in Leiden I finished Richard Powers' latest book, "The Echo Maker". There was more than one resonance in this; Powers had spent time himself in Holland many years previously and this cold flat part of Northern Europe features in more than one of his books. And the "Echo Maker" situates itself on the plains of Nebraska.

Present:

In Paris: Here is the review of Powers' book I wrote during this trip, the text which follows after those two paragraphs.

My trip to Leiden was otherwise uneventful, just a handful of days at the start of March. Walking from the University to my hotel through unpredictable sudden showers of rain and hail. In the distance rolling raincloud after rolling raincloud coming in from the ocean only a short distance away. Cold, damp air, fields around sodden with water. In the streets and on the buses I found people to be unfailingly friendly and helpful, all of them speaking perfect English. I was confused: this air and weather told me that I must be in some gloomy corner of a certain set of northern Islands. And at mid-day, almost nothing to eat in the University canteen: my years in France and Italy have made me an unhappy traveler at times. In the canteen, I endlessly slid my tray from the beginning to the end of the line in a desperate and fruitless search for sustenance: instead, I found five different kinds of sandwiches, soup, milk. How could one have such a large canteen with no warm food? The question remains unanswered.

On the preparation of espresso ... (part 2)

2008-04-02T23:30:00.001+02:00

Of course to prepare espresso you need an espresso machine. Bizarrely enough these are not so easy to find in Paris! If you go to Darty or Galleries Lafayete you will certainly find a bewildering variety of coffee machines, but in fact all of them should be avoided. There is also the fashion these days for espresso machines with disposable capsules, made in a variety of interesting shapes, but these only make espresso like you would find in a bar - in Paris. Not what I wanted. You can also decide to spend thousands of euros and buy something which has more transistors than the IAP computer room, but I didn't want that either. What I really wanted was a Gaggia, one of the oldest brands of Italian espresso machine. In fact, it was mister Achile Gaggia who invented the electric pump-driven espresso machine back in the 1940s (I would really have loved to have seen his laboratory! Did everyone spend all day tasting espresso?). Their most popular espresso machine model, the Gaggia Classic, has been in production for decades. Finding such a coffee machine proved to be impossible in Paris and in the end I bought it from these folks, along with a grinder.

That was around two years ago now. Since then I've been making around 10-15 espressos per day, in the morning and in the afternoon. My office has become somewhat of a mecca for coffee at the IAP. The ritual is always the same: the first thing that I do each morning when I arrive is I turn on the espresso machine, and heat the filter holder. This takes around ten to fifteen minutes (the gaggia has a super-powerful 1200W element). Then I grind the coffee. Then I heat the cups with hot water. Then I tamp the espresso down in the now toasty-hot filter holder. I empty the cups. Then I push the button! This is what happens! (The coffee images are courtesy of mr. J. Seagull):

Look at that lovely crema! It takes about fifteen or twenty seconds to make two excellent espressos. That's a cup from one of my favourite coffee brands, from Bologna, Caffe 14 Luglio. (The coffee I am using here is Caffe Trobetta, from Rome).

Here's what the crema looks like (mmmm):

And here are some satisfied coffee-drinkers:

Until the next espresso!

On the preparation of espresso... (part 1)

2008-04-02T22:32:00.001+02:00

When I arrived in Marseille almost a decade ago now (cripes) I came to a somewhat startling realisation: my path through life seemed to be leading inexorably towards better and better coffee. Now the coffee -- espresso -- in Marseille is nothing special, but it is infinitely better than what was available in England. And only two years after that, I found myself in Bologna, Italy, and once you have lived in Italy your appreciation of espresso and coffee is changed for life, irrevocably.

I admit to having erred for many years, to having prepared coffee by many different methods. In Canada, I amused myself making large drinks composed primarily of frothy milk with a minute quantity of espresso, prepared in a cheap steam-powered espresso machine. The kind that after only a few months starts to leak dangerously. This kind of beverage is very much the tradition in the pacific north-west, and it was only later I realised that the gallons of milk were necessary to hide the terrible burnt taste of the espresso they have over there (try drinking just the espresso and you will see). That was the beginning of my habit of preparing coffee at work. In Durham, England, I fought a losing battle with overzealous health and safety officials, who cut off the power cable for my coffee machine whilst I was away observing in Hawaii. They were also worried that my office would become infested by coffee-drinking mice, attracted by the coffee grains. So I switched to what they call in England a "french press" or a "bodum". A fine way making strong coffee, but it's not espresso. In Marseille, I found out about the 'moka', the Italian coffee-making hand-grenade, and I installed a hot-plate in my office and it became my preferred way of making coffee until I bought a slightly more expensive coffee machine, a krups nova. Then I moved to Bologna.

At which point all coffee preparation stopped. I found that even coffee which came from the departmental coffee machine produced superior espresso to my krups, something which I very soon realised actually made very bad espresso. It amazed me, wandering around Bologna and Italy how good the espresso actually was in almost every bar you went to. On the internet one can find long and painful stories of uber-geeks striving to make the perfect espresso, roasting grinds in their garden sheds, carrying out complicated electro-mechanical modifications to espresso machines costing perhaps thousands of dollars when....in Italy, you wander into a random bar lost in the outskirts of a nondescript town run by an elderly couple who haven't changed the decor since 1970s and you find ... they make perfect espresso.

But only in Italy. I was amazed, driving across to France in my old Ascona, that the minute you cross the border, the espresso quality immediately drops. You can go into an Autogrill / Autostop on either side of the border, and on one side, you will get Italian espresso, on the other side what passes for espresso here in France. That's another the paradox, incidentally: in France, we have wonderful cafes, but the coffee is of mediocre quality. In Italy, no-one spends more than about fifteen seconds drinking their espressos. Their cafes are places to spend very little time in at all.

How is espresso different between France and Italy? It is kind of remarkable that this difference even exists, because if you go into any bar in Paris you will see that they have the same machines that one finds in a bar in Italy. But here in France the espresso is thin, watery, and bitter, with very little crema. The amount of espresso served too is a lot larger -- I would say that it is about twice as large as you might find it standard Italian measure (I'm not talking about Naples, of course, because that is another extreme). The unfortunate difference seems to stem from a combination of inferior coffee beans and preparation, as far as I can tell. So, returning to France, to Paris, from my two years in Italy I knew that if I wanted real espresso I would have to prepare it myself...

Dark matter, dark energy, epicycles

2008-04-01T23:32:00.003+02:00

Two years of blog posts and not a single one about astrophysics! But today, once again, I was interviewed by a journalist who wanted to know about dark matter. Wouldn't we all! Around a year ago the maps of dark matter made by my collaborators in the
COSMOS project made the front page of Nature and as I was a co-author on the paper I got quite a few questions from curious journalists. I have a particularly fond memory of the intensive questioning I was given by Raphael Hittier of E-tele on the roof of the IAP building in the middle of a particularly cold Paris winter with a Siberian wind blasting across the terrace whilst Raphael asked me: "Qu'est-ce-que la matiere noir"? Ahhh...brr....

What indeed? I remember being astonished whilst I was a postdoctoral student in Durham to find out about the current orthodoxy, the Cold Dark Matter model (CDM for the initiated). And to learn that people had spent millions of hours of computer time on the world's fastest computers making model universes filled with a mysterious substance whose exact properties were known very well (it's a cold, dark, collisionless fluid which doesn't interact with ordinary matter) -- but whose precise nature was and still is a complete mystery. Okay, so we know what this stuff does -- but what is it, anyway?

People have speculated that dark matter exists since at least the 1930's when Fritz Zwicky realised that the rotation curves of galaxies could only be explained if there was a lot of matter in those galaxies which was not luminous. And in recent years gravitational lensing has given us spooky cosmic x-ray vision showing us where exactly the mass is, thanks to the deflection of light near gravitational sources. So maybe this stuff is really there.

As a graduate student, under the shadow of the cathedral in Durham, the mystery deepened even further. A lunch-time talk, I think it was, that wonderful Anglo-Saxon tradition (no-one would ever countenance such a thing in Italy or France, can you imagine working whilst eating?), rustling brown paper bags, crisp packets, coca-cola, and a presentation with a graph showing distance to supernovae plotted against the speed they were moving away from us. The "Hubble diagram", named after mr. Edwin Hubble, who presented some of the first observational evidence that the Universe was expanding (which some of the theorists of the time actually expected). Every Hubble diagram I'd seen until then had showed a neat, linear relation between distance and velocity; the universe, the fabric of space and time itself, was expanding, and as a consequence more distant objects were moving away more rapidly. Except that in this Hubble diagram, there was something not right: some of the most very distant supernovae were just off the simple linear relation. Their error bars grazed the arrow-straight line of constant slope. But only a few of them.

It was an error, right? There was some mistake with the observations? Nobody wanted to believe that those outliers were real. It would meant that not only the Universe was expanding but also- gasp - accelerating. The cosy preferred model of the Universe that theorists had built up (which admittedly was looking a bit frayed for other reasons) would have to be discarded, radically revised, and someone would have to explain what exactly was pushing distant objects faster and faster apart, almost like a negative gravity.

But the outliers were real, and the Universe really is accelerating. The universe it seems is filled with some kind of invisible, dark energy, the exact nature of which is still unknown. It is this, somehow, which is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. Most of the mega-projects planned for astronomy in the next ten or twenty years will be devoted to finding out more about dark matter and dark energy, projects like LSST or Pann-starrs, which will map thousands of square degrees of sky to incredibly faint limits, making the most detailed maps of the universe, and hopefully ruling out some of the wackier models of dark energy.

But you do wonder, don't you? I think of Mr. Ptolemy and his planetary epicycles, a complicated model which was replaced by something simpler and more universal (newtonian gravitation). The current cosmological model works really well -- add in dark matter, dark energy turn the handle, and you can reproduce incredibly well all of the current cosmological observations to exquisite precision (modeling the formation of galaxies is another story). But the fact that almost all of the Universe (70% dark energy, 25% dark matter) consists of material of which we know almost nothing is more than a little unsettling -- there may well be a hidden truth lurking in there, waiting to be discovered. A sign change that changes everything? An extra ingredient added to the model that makes 70% of the Universe suddenly become something else? We will find out soon enough, I hope.

Technorati Tags: Dark Energy, Dark Matter, cosmology

E. M. Gombrich and the history of art

2008-03-29T17:18:00.000+01:00

I have some amount of catching up to do. I realise that more than two months have elapsed between the last post and the one before that. It's not as if I haven't read anything or been anywhere: I just lacked a little bit of motivation, milord. So here goes again, this with E. M. Gombrich's "History of art":

It must have taken almost a year for me to read this book, but then I started it at the same time as Pynchon's 1000-page "Against the day" and both of them are weighty tomes. The Gombrich was actually written in English, but I read the French translation, all five hundred pages of it. Another no mean feat in itself.

Gombrich's book comes in many editions. There is the heavy coffee-table version, with colour reproductions of famous artworks interleaved with the text. I had bought the "edition de poche" which I carried with me during many months. In this edition, the plates are all at the back, and there are two bookmarks so one can find one's way easily from the text to the illustrations. The green paper cover on my copy is now pretty worn, but all the pages are still there. The illustrations are a judicious selection of works of art spanning thousands of years of human civilization, from the caves in Lascaux to David Hockney. Deep underneath Paris, wedged between three other people in the tiny narrow seats of the line four metro, I felt more than a bit relieved to gaze at reproductions of Vermeer, Carvaggio, El Greco, Piero della Francesca, or to stare at pictures of famous buildings from Rome or Naples. I'm kind of disappointed to have finished the book, to no longer have those images with me wherever I go.

Gombrich is "old school": he believes, unfashionably for today I suppose, that there is such a thing as art, that there are absolute standards of excellence which can be divined by any intelligent person and which endure over the centuries. Every plate is discussed and placed into context. I learned more than a little about each painter and architect but what was most interesting was the historical context. You see, at the start, thousands of years ago, there was not even the notion of "the artist": there were artisans, who created objects on commission. Monuments for tombs, sculptures for public buildings. The renaissance in Italy, in Rome, in Florence: frescos for altars, paintings for churches. The best artists, like Caravaggio (I've just read a recent biography of him, maybe I will find time to write about it) could became very wealthy from their work. The next century, however, everything had changed. The commissions dried up; the reform in Northern Europe meant that displaying images in churches was proscribed. Artists could paint whatever they liked, but they lived a poverty-stricken existence; the best might be able to make a living from drawing portraits.

Fast-foward to the early 20th century. The impressionists: Paris is the world centre of art and culture. What I didn't really appreciate was how much the impressionists were completely rejected by the critical press of the time before being accepted, famous and even rich. All this in the space of a few short years. It's interesting to note that the term "impressionist" was derisory in intent -- as was "gothic", "baroque", and "mannerist". (As was Fred Hoyle's "Big Bang", too.)

In the last chapter, Gombrich makes some interesting comments about art and creation today. In our time, he says, it may be too early to distinguish between fashion and real movements in art which will still be talked about in a hundred years. But the initial rejection of the impressionists by the critics of their epoch has led to a gross overcorrection. Today, the most important aspect of any work of art is if it's new; the search for novelty has become the most important aspect of creation. The public suffers from the same malady: the tradition of the new has rendered irrelevant all other traditions. This, added to the fact that artists today have an incredible freedom which has never existed in any time in history has led to some very strange effects indeed. Everyone is a revolutionary these days.

I'm not sure I completely agree with this. After all I spend more time at Beaubourg than I do at the Louvre; perhaps I am a sufferer as well. But it's interesting to realise to what extent attitudes have changed over the centuries. I think after reading Gombrich's book I do have a better appreciation of what constitutes a work of art, although it is not easy to put into words; the excellence with which the work has been executed perhaps, or the purity of the form, whatever that means. In the end it is perhaps better to look at the plates. Especially whilst making journeys through subterranean Paris, staring out the window from time to time at the utter blackness.

Imre Kertesz: Fatelessness, or "the happiness of the concentration camps"

2008-03-29T10:21:00.001+01:00

Last weekend I read Imre Kertesz's slim novel, "Fatelessness", a book about the experiences of a fourteen year old boy, George Koves, in the infernos of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I had bought this book last summer in New York but had been inspired to read it by seeing a theatre production of Vassily Grossman's "Life and Destiny" (maybe I will write about that tomorrow) and seeing a film about Primo Levi's return to Turin.

"Fatelessness" is astonishing because of the completely dispassionate and unsentimental narration. One day in Budapest, on the way to work with his friends, fourteen-year-old George Koves is plucked from the his bus by a local constable and made to pass a long and tedious day in the customs house. No-one knows why they have been arrested, not even the constable (although those there carry the yellow Jewish star). Before long, he and his friends are made to march across town where they are locked up for the night; thrown into some strange and terrible play. The next day they are faced with the option of traveling to Germany now, to work -- or later, when, they are told, the trains will be even fuller. George thinks as a boy might think about his knowledge of Germany and Germans, wonders idly that perhaps it would have been better if he had studied more foreign languages at school, reflects perhaps that he might now get a chance to see something more of the world. So he travels on the first train leaving. They are sixty to a carriage; but the next trains, they are told, will be even fuller. No-one shows any special maliciousness, with the exception of the German camp guards in Budapest; it seems, this is just something that happens.

The rest of the story everyone knows, in outline: the long journey without water, the arrival after several days of sweltering summer heat. Through a gap in the carriages' wooden slats George sees the words "Auschwitz-Birkenau", but of course they mean nothing to him. Arrival is chaotic, and he is relieved to see German guards: surely they will be able to restore some order. Lines form, people queue; in the factual, bare way it is described, they could be queuing at a post-office. There is an inspection by a doctor. George lies about his age; he says he is sixteen. The doctor takes a few seconds to decide who is fit and who is unhealthy. The fit ones live. George realises soon afterwards what has happened to the people who waited in the other line.

And so life begins in the camps. He is transferred to Buchenwald. Work wears him down almost to the point of death. He is treated with incredible cruelty, his body becomes the body of another person. He becomes weaker and weaker until he can no longer work. He is transferred to the hospital. He is really too young for such work. But he does not die, he survives until the liberation of the camps by the Americans in 1945.

All this you may have read before in many other stories from the camps, but what is different here is George's ironic, detached voice. There is no trace of bitterness. This is the "banality of evil" that Hanna Arendt wrote about. He says: "We hung around and waited in actual fact, if I think about it, for nothing to happen. That boredom, together with that strange anticipation: I think that is the impression, approximately, yes that is in reality what may truly denote Auschwitz -- purely in my eyes of course" (p.119).

Incredibly, George survives, and in the final chapter he returns to Budapest. People see his camp uniform. Tell us about the hell of the camps, a journalist asks him. But George refuses to be led, saying only that he knows what a concentration camp is, but not hell. But wasn't it hell? He says, "Then I would imagine it as a place where it is impossible to become bored". You must find some way of filling each second of each day of each month of each year; in the camps, all knowledge, all understanding of one's situation arrives crashingly at once, and must fill out years of time. The journalist gives him his address on a scrap of paper; he throws it away.

In the next scene, he returns to his old family apartment building to find others living in his flat; his father was deported to the camps before him, his step-mother has remarried. But he does find some people in the building he remembers. They invite him in, but he rapidly becomes exasperated by their conversation. They continually talk about how things "came about" while they were stayed in Budapest during the war -- the ghetto, shootings, and finally liberation. George instead recounts the story of the queue at Birkenau, the entry to the camps, and he says ..."but it was not quite true that the thing 'came about'; we had gone along with it too. Only now, and thus after the event, looking back, in hindsight, does the way it all 'came about' seem over, finished, unalterable, finite, so tremendously fast, and so terribly opaque. And if, in addition, one knows one's fate in advance, of course." (p. 257) George does not want to "forget" or "put behind" what happened to him because "...I now needed to start doing something with that fate, needed to connect it to somewhere or something; after all, I could no longer be satisfied with the notion that it had all been a mistaken, blind fortune, some kind of of blunder, let alone that it had not even happened."

But fate is arbitrary; in the queue, his path could have so easily led to the left or the right. Moreover, awful crimes can be committed by ordinary people in banal circumstances (he talks about the beautifully tended flower-beds near the Auschwitz crematorium); all this has become possible thanks to our complete control of systems and processes; no one person is responsible; instead, each instead are part of a larger process, a larger mechanism. That, for me, was the core of this book.

Technorati Tags: Auschwitz, Imre Kertesz

Irish Cinema: "Garage"

2008-01-20T11:20:00.000+01:00

It's not so often that I see an Irish movie in the cinemas here in Paris. Much longer than I remember. So it was with interest that I went to see "Garage", a film by Lenny Abrahamson and starring the well-know Irish actor Pat Shortt, which opened here last week.

The plot is minimal: Shortt plays Josie, a simple-minded petrol station attendant deep in Ireland. It's very much a film in that favourite genre of mine, the "Inaction movie". His service station is a fossil, a museum of 1950's Ireland. Shortt lives in a dingy room in back and spends his evenings either at the small pub in town (where a few of the clients are needlessly cruel to him) or staring out across the fields. The station's owner, we are told, is content to let it decay because he knows that it will only be a matter of time before it will more interesting, financially, to bulldoze the site and build houses. This is, after all, the new Ireland. One morning the station's owner arrives with his girlfriend's son, who is to help Josie at the station.

Josie has been working at this garage for a very long time, and has dug a very deep hole of solitude for himself out in the fields where his garage is. He is desperate to make friends, to strike a bond with someone, but he just can't communicate what he thinks, and no-one really takes the time to listen to him. He is relentlessly cheerful and friendly to everyone, regardless of what they tell him. Josie develops a bond of sorts with his new assistant, but all does not work out well.

I was reminded me of Patrick Kavanagh's lonely farmer in that classic of Irish poetry,"The Great hunger", condemned to spend the rest of his life staring at the field across the road. The countryside around Josie is beautiful and desolate in a very Irish way. You see, these fields and hills do not speak. There are no swathes of great open spaces inviting freedom and liberty here: this Irish landscape is very different from the one which Sean Penn's wild-eyed seeker-after-truth experienced in "Into the wild" which is currently filling up the cinemas here in Paris. Instead, the flat level fields and shimmering lakes (all beautifully filmed) have a horizon which is foreshortened and proximate.

The film's dominant register is a very subdued, tragicomic one, and the story proceeds relentlessly from one event to the next to the film's inexorable conclusion. Everything is presented in an unaffected, ultra realist way. I thought a little of Aki Karismaki's miserablist classic, "The matchstick girl" but the difference here is that Josie doesn't fight back. I felt relieved to leave the cinema and find myself once again surrounded by the streets and buildings of Paris.

Some thoughts on Orhan Pamuk's "The black book"

2008-01-16T23:57:00.000+01:00

In Ireland I finished Orhan Pamuk's epic novel of Istambul, "The Black Book". It's long and dense book, and it required a great deal of concentration. The wilds of Ireland is really an ideal place to read it. It had taken me almost two months of Parisian time to reach the half-way mark: in a week in Ireland I finished it.

I'd bought on a recent trip to New York because I realised that most novels I'm reading these days seem to be by authors I've already read. Not too experimental, that! Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel prize for literature, seemed to be an interesting writer, so I thought I would give his book a spin.

There is only really one theme in the book, identity, which I understand is a typically Turkish concern. I can understand that, living on the frontier between East and West, Asia and Europe. (Istambul/Constantinopole/Byzantium has always fascinated me, in fact I made several fruitless attempts to memorize W. B. Yeats' wonderful and incomprehensible poem about that city, and I have always been interested to visit there, but I haven't had the chance so far). In Pamuk's book, everyone is trying to be someone else, is switching identity and place. The principal character spends the entire book searching for his friend and his wife, who aren't there, who are absent, who never show up, and before the end of the book he actually assumes his friend's identity and begins to write his famous newspaper column for him.

The book is full of similar stories of blurring of identities. The real scale of the book are stories of a few pages in length, and there seem to be hundreds, some more fantastic than others. Of an enormous underground city beneath the streets of Istanbul filled with mannequins which are flawless copies of real people. Of an old journalist who, confined to his flat, finally convinces himself that he is Marcel Proust and he is living inside his novels of Proust, and is forever waiting for his sweetheart to return. Of the prince who wants to write only that which is "real" and "true" and which speaks from his inner self; to do this he destroys his library so that these books might not possibly influence him, he strips to furnishings from his house so that his thoughts might be uninterrupted by such distractions. Isolates himself. Returns to zero. Speaks to no-one.

The book's ending is cruel and shocking. I understood, too, why Mr. Pamuk is sometimes less than popular with the Turkish authorities. There is a perhaps a little too much X-ray vision in his picture of Turkish society....

Technorati Tags: Orham Pamuk

Returning to Rome: My visit to the Musei Capitolini

2007-12-23T15:13:00.000+01:00

Back in Ireland once more. The evening before I last I stepped onto the tarmac at Belfast International Airport. The cold, damp night air smelled slightly of manure. Clouds lurked only a few meters above my head, and the tarmac gleamed with rainwater. So now I have time to write about whatever I care to write about.

This time, I choose Constantine's accusing finger. This is one of the first things one sees on entering the Musei Capitolini in Rome, on the Palatine Hill. It was a Wednesday in November, cold and unusually wet. The museum was almost empty. Entering one passes directly into a small courtyard filled with fragments of statues most of which are more than a thousand years old, arranged around the courtyard, mounted on the walls. Amongst them is an enormous head, the head of Emperor Constantine, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire -- and his hand, an accusing index figure pointing skywards. This is all that remains. Echoes of Ozymandias, but no "trunkless legs of stone" here.

The museum is a wonderful collection of artifacts spanning thousands of years of the city of Rome. One of the first public museums in the world, we are told. Before I went there, I knew almost nothing about the collections and so I was constantly amazed when each right turn or left turn took me back through another few hundred years of history. Even back into pre-history. After carefully examining room after room of sculptures and bronzes, a sudden turn took me before the foundations of the temple of Zeus, one of the very first structures constructed in Rome. Here were the foundation stones. Another turn, and there was a vast atrium with an ancient bronze statue of Marcus Aureilius on horseback. In the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci had placed this statue at the centre of the square on Palatine hill, on a plinth he had designed himself. Now the plinth holds a copy, and the original is here, in this beautiful glass atrium.

A tunnel, descending deep into the hill, connects the old museum building to the new one, and the dimly lit walls are lined with Roman funerary inscription for slaves, freemen and senators. But before ascending to recent centuries, a left turn leads to another ancient temple, more foundation stones and statues. Another turn, follow the corridor here, and we leave the museum behind, we are in the Tabularium, which once housed the archives of the Roman state. A long hall with tall windows looks out across the ruins of the Roman city, the Foro Romano. Another level of history.

Climbing back up the tunnel and ancient Rome fades away, and we are back in the Renaissance. There are many wonders to be seen here. One small room is completely filled with busts of famous philosophers, many of which are Roman copies of Greek sculptures. Serried ranks of great thinkers. Nearby, in a small alcove, there is a beautiful statue of a woman. What most struck me about this was the incidental detail that the statue had been found buried near one of the walls of the city. The owners had presumably hidden it there for safe keeping during one of the many invasions which had swept over Rome. They never returned to collect it.

Technorati Tags: Rome, Voyages

Max Beckmann in Munch

2007-12-04T09:07:00.001+01:00

Another trip, this time back to Bavaria again. Southern Germany has become a centre for astrophysical research you know. I spent ten days in Garching, Munich. Where once there were fields there are now hundreds of astronomers. Miles outside the city, far from the beer-halls and car factories. Out there, around the nucleus of the Garching nuclear reactor, a city is growing, populated by students of the physical sciences. A recent important event: recently, after twenty years of waiting, line six of the Munich U-bahn has finally reached Garching-Forschungzentrum, and the walls of the station there are covered with diagrams details the discoveries of generations of (mostly German) scientists specializing in this the most profound of all physical sciences. And of course, out here in the countryside, the laws of nature are just the same as in the centre of Paris.

Of course I made frequent trips into town to see what there was to see. My first week there was with fog and snow and the city became a distinct, unreal thing. Heavy snow fell one day after I arrived. On the Saturday, through the mist and feeble winter light, I was just about able to find my way to that great Munich institution, the Volksbad, and after about half an hour of wandering around inside I found my cabinet and thence to the pool. From the outside, the Volksbad looks more like a church than a swimming pool, it has a clock tower, a nave...when I first saw it I thought: that's really a swimming pool?....A week without swimming my lengths and I felt stiff and my thoughts were sluggish, no matter how much coffee I drank from my moka.

And on the Sunday afternoon I went with a friend to see a temporary exhibition of the works of Max Beckmann at the Pinakothek der Moderne. The same morning, I went to the Alte Pinakothek to see once more some of Durer's paintings that I had not seen since the last time I was there, almost fifteen years previously. I stared at Mr. Durer's self-portrait and he stared back at me across the five centuries which separated us. Meanwhile, from the windows, I could see three enormous Max Beckmann reproductions hanging from the walls of the Pinakothek der Moderne...

Almost all of Beckmann's works presented at the Pinakothek der Moderne were paintings he made in exile. Hitler's Germany was particularly unpleasant place for him: his works were featured in the Nazis "Degenerate art" exhibition, and Beckmann left for Amsterdam on the exhibition's opening day. Five hundred of his paintings were confiscated. At a time when a many European painters had abandoned figuration for the snowy wastes of abstraction, Beckman's paintings were filled with meaning and allegory which mirrored directly the chaotic and violent world which surrounded him. Walking through the gallery my mind returned again to Pierre Bonnard, who, at the same time, Europe in flames, was meticulously searching for the ideal painting of his wife lying in the bath...One of my favourite Beckmann is "Dream of Monte-Carlo" ("Traum von Monte-Carlo"). Croupiers with swords place cards on a green baize table whilst they are shadowed by hooded men carrying fizzing bombs...Beckmann also re-invented the triptych (and that morning I had seen one of Durer's famous ones) which had laid dormant since the middle ages. He filled large canvases with themes of exile and departure...

Technorati Tags: Beckmann, Munich, Voyages

In the eternal city...

2007-11-16T08:08:00.001+01:00

Rain falls outside. It is mid-november, I am in Rome, the original eternal city. I'm here, once again, for the usual no-good reason, a meeting, but of course on either side of this meeting I was sure to include a day or two when I could wander the streets of Rome and visit the many galleries and churches I have yet to visit. Despite having lived in Italy for two years I have only been here twice, and only for perhaps three days in total. There are many things I have not seen, many streets I have not walked down.

Since my arrival the day before yesterday at midday I've made a quick circuit of all the principal sites, just to remind myself that everything is still there. Each time I have visited Rome I have always found the occasion to spend an hour or two in Fori Imperiali , a vast archaeological site in the centre of the city. It is one of the most amazing places I have ever visited in any corner of the world. There, in the centre of Rome, you will find the ruins of the ancient city, half destroyed temples, houses reduced to a skeleton of stones. Solitary doric columns standing amidst a terrain vague of enormous marble blocks in long grass. When I was there a cold, persistent rain was falling and the site was almost empty. More than two millenia have passed since these buildings were built, two millenia those ruins have stood out there in the elements. Of course one naturally thinks, today, shouldn't all this stuff be taken inside? But how can you put a whole city inside a museum?

Not all of ancient Rome is in ruins, of course. There is the pantheon, a vast domed structure of ancient brick and stone with a gaping hole in the centre, an eye on the heavens, built around two thousand years ago and still standing. The building survived the collapse of the Roman Empire perhaps because it had been fortuitously consecrated as a church. The vast dome is completely unsupported; exact details of it's construction have been lost down through the centuries. It would be a one and half millennia until anyone would build anything to surpass it. Walking in the narrow streets nearby, one is filled with a strange feeling, glimpsing here or there an edge of the coupole at the end of a narrow side-street. A glimpse that telescopes back down the centuries, arriving here, in a Rome before everything in the world we know today existed.

Technorati Tags: Rome, Voyages

"Control" - Anton Corbijn's film on Ian Curtis

2007-09-29T17:11:00.000+02:00

Rewind. It's 1989 and I am in Deansgate, Manchester and I'm standing in the street looking up at the ancient bulk of the John Rylands Library. Grey clouds pass overhead in a grey sky. This library seemed to be the oldest building I had ever seen in my life, although it was only constructed at the end of the 19th century. It just looked very old; all ancient brickwork and tiny bottle-green windows buried in thick sandstone walls. Half church and half library. On my walkman (remember this is 1989) I am listening to a cassette tape of Joy Division's "Decades", the last song on their last album. Those long echoey notes reverberating off to infinity and Mr. Curtis mournful voice intoning over and over again "here are the young men ... but where have they been, where have they been?". Hm!

If there was a every a music which is so strongly linked to a time and place for me it would have had to be Joy Division (leading purveyor of what a music journalist once called "undertaker rock") and Manchester. It was years after I left Manchester (where I lived for three years) before I could listen to any of that music again. In Canada in the soft blue-green light of the not-too distant pacific ocean, or in Marseille with its hard Mediterranean light, lead singer Ian Curtis' words could not survive, drowned out by the light. I could not imagine this kind of music ever originating in these kinds of places and even to listen to it there seemed wrong.

But I am back in northern latitudes now, although still far from the grey of Manchester. Far enough north to be interested to see photographer Anton Corbijn's film about Curtis and Joy Division, "Control", which has just been released here in France. The film follows Curtis from his childhood years in Macclesfield to his suicide in 1980 at the age of 23. The film is shot in a beautiful, slightly saturated silvery black and white, a masterstroke, and each scene is carefully framed with a careful photographers eye: many scenes are almost Antonioninen in their simplicity and cadrage. Cast members actually play their respective instruments during the film (they all learned the songs during months of practice beforehand) and Sam Riley bears and incredible, uncanny resemblance to Curtis.

The film recounts faithfully the story of Curtis' rapid ascent to fame and his subsequent inability to cope with all the commitments and responsibilities which that entailed. Having married at a very early age, he found himself locked into a relationship he couldn't escape whilst at the same time he was already seeing another woman, a belgian journalist he'd met at a concert. He saw no way to resolve all this other than by exiting, stage left.

Of course fans know this story in infinite detail. And it is hard to listen to the music without applying the filter of what is to come. It seems in the film that the end comes almost too quickly (as it did in real life I suppose): we only gain a partial insight into Mr. Curtis and his personality and motivation. Some explanations seem straightforward enough; a string of errors leading into an inescapable dead-end. But I felt that somehow early in the film there is only a small hint of what is to come; Curtis doesn't seem to be nearly the mass of contradictions one would need to be in order to lead one to suicide. In the end the film of his life could never be as suffocating and bleak as the music he helped create, I think (which is probably a good thing), even though the music plays a very important part in the film.

Technorati Tags: Anton Corbijn, Control, Ian Curtis

David Sylvian at "La Cigale" (The world is everything tour)

2007-09-22T16:01:00.000+02:00

Mr David Sylvian in Paris: yesterday evening at the Cigale. The Cigale is one of the oldest concert venues in Paris, perhaps a hundred years old now. Full of wrought iron railings, red seats. Perhaps a little dark. The last time I saw Mr. Sylvian in concert was at the Teatro Manzoni in Bologna. Bologna being the incredibly dense and compact place that it is, I didn't know that this venue even existed, a short few metres from my house on the other side of the Via Independenzia, until the concert. Watching the soundcheck through an open backstage door, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, I imagined that Mr. Sylvian might be nearby, perhaps sipping an espresso at the Caffe Impero or any one of the other myriad bars in the centre of Bologna.

Last night's concert was very different from that of Bologna in 2003. Back then, Mr. Sylvian appeared on stage with only one other musician, his brother and drummer Steve Jansen; behind them, a swirling procession of images crossed the walls thanks to the visual artist Masakatsu Takagi, which lent one believe that one might almost understand what each song was really about. On stage, the sound was raw and spiky, full of static and clicks, with Derek Bailey's er -- difficult -- guitar improvisations providing backdrop for many of the songs. Mr. Sylvian's voice lent an incredible contrast to these difficult textures and made them bearable. There was some terrible story to tell here, and Mr. Sylvian played all the songs from Blemish in the exact same order as on the CD so that in the end we understood.

Yesterday evening we had left some of this difficult terrain behind. Sylvian was on stage with several other musicians to present work from his most recent studio album, "Snow Borne Sorrow". I was curious to see how this would work: I had read in interviews that each track was assembled in the dead of night using Pro Tools and that most of the musicians had never actually played together before. And the sound was so intricately, flawlessly engineered, there was a certain perfect crystalline form to it, yes, like a snowflake. How could this be reproduced in concert?

In the end, perhaps I should not have been too concerned. After the first initial shock of hearing Mr. Sylvian's voice once more, always fuller and more resonant than it could ever sound on the little loudspeakers in my apartment, I realised that of course each composition was strong enough to exist by itself, out in the world. After all, as Mr. Sylvian explained in interviews, many of these songs had come into existence in the cold New England mid-winter: a mild September evening in Paris could hardly be so threatening. The depth and emotion in the new songs are astonishing; they stand up very well against the rest of Mr. Sylvian's work. They are as good as anything he has written, even back to the legendary "Secrets of the beehive".

Mr. Sylvian's fellow musicians made it easy to shape the older songs into a jazz idom, which worked very well for some ("Ghosts", for example) and less well for others (in "Fire in the Forest" I thought the buzzing electronics were a bit too far back in the mix for my liking). But still a wonderful evening, Mr. Sylvian's beautiful voice and thoughtful lyrics were as captivating as ever. Mr. Sylvian has created a very interesting and unique corner for himself in modern music, in a strange land somewhere between pop and jazz and new music and surrounded himself with extremely talented and inventive performers; two of the most moving tracks of the evening were written by a fellow musicians from his Samadhi sound label. I'm looking forward to the next installment already, in the shape of brother Steve Jansen's forthcoming "Slope" album.

Technorati Tags: David Sylvian, The world is everything tour, La Cigale

On the other side of the "Great firewall of China"

2007-09-10T21:59:00.000+02:00

I'm back in Paris now. I have been back for a week now. At last I can actually see the posts I wrote whilst in China. Although I was able to upload my posts from Beijing and Xining I could not actually to see them - blogspot.com is blocked, as well as a few other sites. Their filtering mechanism is quite sophisticated: some sites just time out (like bbcnews.com), whilst for others (like the wikipedia page on 'Lhasa' for instance) one is presented with a brutal 'network connection lost'.

But total control of information is a Chinese speciality. We visited the site of Ganden monastery on the last day of our organised tour. The chinese tour guide reluctantly admitted that the monastery was 'slightly' damaged during the Cultural revolution; while he told us this I was reading in my Guide routard that they had blocked the exit roads of the monastery with tanks, bombarded the buildings with cannons and aeroplanes, and machine-gunned any monks trying to escape. Hm! A slight discrepancy. When I asked our tour guide, "So, this place is full of Tibetan separatists is it?" he replied cooly, "You will have to ask the chinese government that".

In my second to last day I actually met a plain-clothes monk, a friendly man on his way to Nepal who wrote for me in my notebook in Tibetan, "I like tibetan tea" (he spoke quite good English). On my last day in Lhasa I made an epic hike into the hills around the city and visited two remote monasteries. The people I met were very friendly, even thought we had very few words in common. At the second, I showed the words written for me in my notebook, and bam! I didn't get out of there until I had drunk at least four our five cups of yak butter tea! Yum! I confess I like the stuff, but after four cups I started to feel a little queasy. The descent down to Lhasa however, in the clear mountain area, soon calmed my stomach.

Some of my photographs of my trip to Tibet are here.

Technorati Tags: China, Tibet, voyages

My last days in Lhasa...

2007-09-02T15:46:00.000+02:00

I left Lhasa this morning. In the street outside my room, the hotel porter traced in sooty water droplets on the cab roof how much it would cost me to get to the airport. OK! And then we were speeding off through the rainy streets of Lhasa, past the imposing bulk of the Potala, down broad avenues and out into the countryside.

It wasn't clear to me where one could construct an airport in Tibet; there are so many steep ravines and mountains. After an almost hour of speeding down narrow roads snaking past valleys and mountains it was still not clear just where exactly the airport was hidden. Then suddenly we passed into a long tunnel drilled through the hillside, over a bridge and then another bridge and the airport was there. More incredible Chinese feats of civil engineering. A few hours later, as the aeroplane pulled very steeply away from the runway, I could see we were flying along a vast flood plain. Lakes and rivers far below glittered in the oblique morning light. Steep mountains crowded the cabin windows on each side of the aeroplane. In another half an hour or so, the Tibetan plateau had vanished beneath the clouds.

But returning to Lhasa: once we were free from our Chinese tour guide, I had three days to explore the city. As I said, I changed hotel to one in the centre of the old Tibetan town, and not the new Chinese city, which is utterly without interest. Although our tour guide had warned us about 'tall handsome Tibetan men' as they were apparently the most dangerous and avaricious, I was not frightened! I spent the good part of two afternoons walking around the narrow streets and looking into the shops, visiting the occasional temple.

Of course the main feature of Lhasa is the barkour, a series of concentric circles pilgrims make around the city's most important temple. A great mass of people circles around and around, ebbing and flowing throughout day's passage. Most of these are pilgrims, old faces tanned to a deep, heavily wrinkled brown by the plateau's harsh ultraviolet radiation, twirling prayer wheels in one hand and counting beads in the other. Softly chanting under their breath. The women wear long skirts patterned with the traditional Tibetan colours, often with white cloth hats to protect against the sun's rays. The men are dressed in dark suits. There is not the slightest hint of modernity, there is no location in time. If I were to fade to monochrome the pictures I made and airbrush away the tourists, they could have been taken at any time this century. The churning crowd at times is enveloped by blue clouds of burning incense. Most of these pilgrims are old, but the monks in their red robes seemed to be much younger. I imagined that this is what it must have been like in the crypt of St. Denis in the middle ages, when the relentless and unending flux of the faithful led Abbe Suger to invent gothic architecture...

Everything in the city centres around the barkour, from the countless souvenir stands which line its route to the markets in the streets around. Nearby, I found a shop specialising in prayer wheels. A small weight is attached to a metal cylinder mounted on a wooden pole. Inside the cylinder, prayers are written on a tightly coiled spiral of paper. A slight circular motion of the hand is enough to spin the wheel and prayers are emitted towards heaven. Modifications on demand! When I passed the shop, pilgrims were crowded around the owner who was shortening one prayer wheel whose pole was slightly too long.

Towards the periphery, the streets become slightly more frayed, the pavements more uneven, the buildings slightly less well maintained. Streets too narrow for any kind of motorised vehicle. One can see all manner of things. On the ground here, the bloodied carcass of a yak, for sale; against a building over there, monks chanting in prayer. And asking for money! I suspected that there not real monks. A faint whiff of unpurified sewage hanging in the air. In the markets, every imaginable type of produce is offered, many of them unidentifiable to western eyes. I suppose all of this is what the streets of European cities might have been like a hundred, two hundred years ago.

Technorati Tags: China, Lhasa, Tibet, voyages

In Lhasa

2007-08-31T04:24:00.000+02:00

I am in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. I've been here for four or five days, and in two further days I will leave to return to Beijing, and then to Paris on Sunday. It's now two weeks since I left home.

I've changed my hotel room. I came here on a guided tour organised as part of the conference I attended in Xining, and that tour finished a day or so ago. In in the space of three days I saw an incredible amount of sights, but now at last I have time to absorb it all before I head west. Our tour company organised things efficiently for us but, alas, without almost any sense of aesthetics. We were booked into a clean, modern Chinese hotel in the new part of Lhasa. All our needs were catered to. Our guide was slightly incredulous that we had no interest in eating (Chinese food) in the hotel's (almost) subterranean dining room facing the parking lot when we could be wandering the ancient streets of Lhasa and eating momo and drinking yak butter tea.

My new hotel is infinitely preferable to my older one. I am in the centre of town on almost the last floor. It is a damp morning, like most mornings here, and the mountains surrounding the town are wreathed in cloud. A fine misty rain is falling. Heavy storms rolled over the city last night and this morning, which is a little hard to imagine, as we are already at an altitude of 3,400m. From my hotel window I see a chaotic jumble of rooftops, slightly strange here for Lhasa as almost all the buildings have flat roofs and are almost all the same height. My small hotel room is filled with intricately patterned traditional Tibetan wooden furniture, which is a great relief after weeks of anonymous Chinese hotels.

One metre across the narrow street I see a rooftop garden with dozens of flowers in pots. An elderly lady emerged only a few minutes ago to water them. On a old iron drum nearby there is a blue thermos which I know is probably full of Yak butter tea. A few meters further to left to the left I see many coloured cloths tied to a pole high on the roof. These are prayer flags, each scrap of cloth contains incantation after incantation, lines and lines of prayer. The closer to the sky these prayer flags are, the more powerful they are. The mountains around Lhasa (some of which reach more than 4,000m) are covered in them. The air is full of the sounds of horns and bells, Lhasa's chaotic traffic. The street where my hotel lies is a market street, full of every imaginable kind of produce. There are people there until late into the night.

This is where I am; in the next day or two I will try to recount where I have been.

Technorati Tags: Lhasa, Tibet, voyages

Crossing the empty spaces: Xining to Lhasa

2007-08-31T04:11:00.000+02:00

So the story to tell now is how I traversed the great empty spaces between Xining and Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. In the past, the only overland route for such a journey would have involved days on a crowded bus over narrow treacherous roads, if you were lucky enough to get a travel permit. Lhasa is high on the Tibetan plateau, at an altitude of 3400m, and getting there in olden days was well-nigh impossible. Tibet was a real mountain kingdom, a distant inaccessible land.

Of course all that has changed. In the last year the Chinese government has finished an enormous construction project, costing billions of dollars, with the ultimate aim of linking Lhasa and Beijing by railway. The part of the railway between Goldmud and Lhasa was opened this year, and now each evening at ten a train arrives carrying voyagers from the other side of the Tibetan plateau. This was the train that I took, from Xining. A voyage which lasted around 25 hours and reached in places altitudes of 5000 metres...

Last Friday evening a small group of us assembled on the steps of Xining train station and were taken to the train by our Chinese guides, through an incredible press of people. The train was making a brief stop in Xining before continuing on to Lhasa, and this was where we boarded. There was around twelve of us in our group, and all of us had been in Xining for a conference. I found easily enough my narrow bed, one of six, in a small cabin. My cabin companions were polite but spoke no english. Although it was only 10.30pm in the evening, the easiest thing to do was to do go to sleep; there was nothing else to do. And sleep came rapidly, thanks to the rocking of the train on the rails. We were travelling at a leisurely sixty kilometres an hour towards Lhasa. A short time after I had stretched out in my bed (miraculously I had space enough for that) the wagon guard drew the curtains and turned off the lights.

The next morning I awoke somewhat abruptly to the muffled strains of Chinese martial music. The lights were on once more, the curtains drawn. Time to wake up. I struggled from my bed and peered out. An arid, desolate landscape scrolled past the windows, flat and uninhabited. Absolutely nothing was visible in all directions. At each window down the length of the car, Chinese tourists were avidly taking photographs and video footage. Or preparing breakfast. Each wagon featured an abundant supply of hot water and throughout the journey passengers were constantly making tea or noodles. None of that for me! I located an electric socket on the train and before too long I was preparing espresso in my 'moka electrika'; real coffee is almost impossible to find in China.

The train stopped at Golmud, and the public address system informed us in great detail (with many precise statistics) of the virtues of this completely lost city, what mineral resources were available, how many people lived there. How it was an essential staging post for the construction of the Beijing-Lhasa railway. We had a few minutes in the rain on the platform before before boarding the train once more. I don't think anyone got on the train. Between these public service announcements throughout the voyage we were subjected to a bewildering variety of music, from Chinese pop to pseudo-tibetan folk music to marching music, all at an ear-splitting volume. Luckily I had my ear-plugs. I suppose the music selection was designed to inspire us when confronted with this vast land. I soon realised that many Chinese on the train were humming the airs sotte voce throughout the journey.

Our altitude slowly increased. I became gradually aware of a hissing noise everywhere throughout the train. Although the cabins were not pressurised, they were oxygenated, and a steady flow of gas came from nozzles in each cabin. I began to feel slightly light-headed from the thinness of the air. I am sure that our week in Xining, altitude 2000 metres, had helped us to acclimatise, but still.

Now there were salt flats sliding past the cabin windows, great expanses of the whites and browns. The PA system informed us of the immense difficulties that had been overcome to lay train-tracks over this barren wasteland. Every so often, we passed a row of green huts and trucks: Chinese military barracks, each one more remote than the last. I imagined sleeping and working there, the extreme remoteness of it all. It was the only form of habitation we saw.

Next there were mountains with snow; and then were surrounded by snow-fields and glaciers. Freezing clouds enveloped the train; our altitude was now well above 4000 metres. We were higher than the summit of Mauna Kea. We were travelling over the permafrost, and the cabin loudspeakers told us what a feat of engineering it was to lay train tracks on ground which shifts and melts, which isn't really solid at all.

The snow receded, we were crossing grasslands. A lake, an enormous limitless lake appeared, beautiful blue-green waters stretching impossibly far away. The world's highest freshwater lake, we were told. After that, signs of habitation became visible. We stopped at brand new stations constructed in the middle of unending wilderness; the train doors did not open, presumably because of the incredible altitude. Passengers might faint on the platform. Station Na Qu, for example, at 4,513 metres above sea level. I felt almost as if I was in a spaceship, travelling through hostile alien lands with no breathable atmosphere.

A few more scattered habitations became visible, huts lost in the plain. I remember seeing two men lying beside their motorcycle, watching the train go past. I tried to imagine what life must have been like in this land before the train arrived. What life must be like now. Then darkness fell, and after another six or so hours of travel, we arrived in Lhasa. The train station, an enormous modernist structure, was brand new, and far outside the town, so we had no sense of the city when we arrived. That would have to wait until the next day.

Technorati Tags: China, Lhasa, Sky Train, Tibet, voyages

In Xining

2007-08-19T11:54:00.000+02:00

Travelling again, this time far to the east, to a city at the other end of the alphabet and the Eurasian continent. A journey that Mr. Marco Polo would have taken months and years to make was one I made whilst leisurely reading my books and sipping champagne (Air France unexpectedly upgraded my ticket to business class, doubtless as a result of my endless voyages around the globe. My aeroplane even passed over Ulan Bator, one of my favourite 'uttermost places' as Bruce Chatwin would have called it, before landing in Beijing.) A thousand kilometers to the north of here are the vast open expanses of the Monogolian steppe, deserts unmeasurable to man. Xining itself is full of greys and browns and little green; a dry town it seems.

I spent two days in Beijing before heading out here. It is the first time I am in China. Beijing seems to me to be a city of great extremes: broad stalinien avenues with imposing buildings either side of the treeless boulevards, which alternate with narrow hutongs, a warren of narrow streets and alleys which seem to have existed for centuries. Some these areas seem to border on waste ground, or are in the process of being demolished....Tianamen of course was very impressive; with a strong central authority one can of course undertake all sorts of grandiose architectural schemes.

But right now I am in central china, in a city of two millions, an ancient stop on the old silk road but now a forest of high-rise buildings. Every tower seems to have been constructed in the last few decades although during the arrival from the airport I saw old earth-coloured buildings merging into hillside, structures which seemed very old. But this new city is shrouded in smog and the horizon and mountains around are invisible. So it must have be in Manchester and London a hundred years ago, I suppose. In my hotel room I can hear incessant banging and clanking coming from a new high-rise under construction next to here. But far below some of the buildings below seem semi-derlict. The view from my hotel room window (which has not been cleaned in many millennia) looks like this:

I am here for one week, for a conference, and then I am heading to Tibet, yes, Tibet. On the famous train which goes to 5 kilometers above sea level. I will try to write about that, too. And about Xining, before I leave.

On my six months with Mr. Pynchon's "Against the day"

2007-08-11T18:53:00.000+02:00

I've just finished -- a few weeks ago -- Mr. Pynchon's latest novel, "Against the day". The book is a weighty 1100 pages long. The actual physical bulk of Mr. Pynchon's text makes reading it even more challenging. Being in Paris, of course, one would like to spend some time on a nice terrace somewhere with the damn thing, but the book is so heavy that one thinks twice about taking it anywhere. My slim civil-service briefcase (honestly) bulged noticeably and I always knew I had it with me. On the crowded metro line four, everyone looked at me when I took it from my bag. On longer transatlantic voyages I thought twice about packing it with me as I am a checked-luggage only kind of guy and adding that book means subtracting socks for a week. The last book of considerable bulk that I read was David Foster Wallaces' "Infinite Jest" which was also over the 1,000 page mark (but that was a paperback).

Yes, but what about the book? It's of course impossible to distil it's essence into a few words. There is the thinnest of plot lines to connect all the disparate threads of the book: it's a cowboy revenge story set around the turn of the century which crosses many different continents, from the far American west to deep under the deserts of inner Asia. Mr Pynchon's book teems with characters, most of which only appear once never to be seen again. Because the book is so long it can be difficult to keep track of everyone (a friend of mine kept an annotated Dramatis Personae to remind him who was who). Floating above the main action of the book are the ballonists "the Chums of Chance" a "Band of Boys" drawn in from the classic adventure-story mould. In the best metafictional tradition however, these boys are aware of the novels they appear in. They communicate back with (an ill-defined) base using an action-at-distance receiving apparatus which works thanks to one of Nicola Tesla's lesser known discoveries in the physical sciences.

For me that's what makes the book so enjoyable -- it's the geeky humour and scientific in-jokes. In Mr. Pynchon's Universe, coyboys are au fait with the latest developments in experimental physics, such as Michelson and Morley's famous interfermetric experiments. In our universe, those experiments demonstrated conclusively that the lumiferous ether didn't exist but in Mr. Pynchon's continuum this outcome is never so clearly stated. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was not apparent which path modern physics would go down, what things would be possible and what things would be impossible. Suppose there really was a lumiferous ether? And that Mr. Tesla's inventions really did work as advertised? All sorts of things could become possible, including travelling in time. In one of my favourite scenes in the book, the Chums of Chance take a trip in a poorly-maintained time-machine operated underneath a stretch of New York's elevated subway (where there is, of course, a plentiful supply of electricity). It's not clear where the Chums are hurled, the distant past or the distant future, but they catch a terrifying glimpse of dark plain filled with unknown beasts and an overpowering stench of decay and excrement.

There are other brilliant scenes in the book -- the Chums' descent deep under the desert using a new form of propulsion -- but they are embedded deep in several other threads of the story which are much less interesting. It's not clear where Mr. Pynchon is going here; his last book, "Mason and Dixon" offered a slightly less opaque story, with characters one could care about (it's still my favourite book of all time about astronomers) and many of the same themes of "Against the day". It's impossible not to admire the immense erudition and energy of this latest work but hey! Why not edit it just a little?

From New York to Paris

2007-06-28T00:33:00.000+02:00

I'm just back from a week in Manhattan. I stayed in a small hotel in Chelsea, down near 17th street, near sixth avenue. My room was long and narrow, perhaps no more than a few metres in width and with high ceilings. Once my meeting was over, I spent the weekend wandering the streets of Manhattan, visiting the many chelsea art galleries, attempting random walks. Manhattan now seems much less full of strange and unusual people than it did when I was first there, back in 1992; the city has changed a lot.

Each morning I found myself at the Hollywood Diner (open 24 hours!) where I could order pancakes and watch New Yorkers hurry to work along the pavement (I mean sidewalk) outside. This was the nearest cafe to my hotel, and I reflected on the differences between that cafe and the nearest cafe to my apartment in Paris, the "Bouquet d'Alesia" where I have eaten many an "entrecote gratin daphinoise" (but perhaps not at 9AM in the morning). Certainly the menus in Alesia were not nearly as extensive as proposed by the Hollywood Diner - there must have been hundreds of items to choose from, all of which I suppose were prepared at the same lightning-fast speed with with my pancakes materialised each morning. Could they really make all this stuff?

I spent a morning wandering around Chelsea, and attempted to visit the galleries - but there were hundreds of them, and I gave up somewhere in the middle of the afternoon after perhaps having been through only three or four streets. The galleries are very densely packed down there, one door after another. Bizzarely enough, the galleries alternate with garages and auto repair shops, so it's not uncommon to leave one exhibition space only to enter another and think "My gosh, this installation looks exactly like a partly disassembled Toyota! And all that machine oil on the floor is so realistic! And those men in overalls!" only to realise that in fact, it really is a garage, rather than just looking like one.

About the best thing I saw the galleries of Chelsea were some new photographs by Andreas Gursky (a snip at around $300,000 each), amongst them one of some technicians in the Superkamiokande mine in Japan. One sees serried ranks of photomultiplier tubes up to the ceiling, a million eyes. In the middle distance technicians are paddling across the inky black surface of the super-pure heavy water in a canoe. Scale and proportion are hard to grasp - surely this is image has been altered in some way? But no, this is actually reality...

Amongst other things I did in Manhattan was to make a visit to the Strand bookstore - but more on that in the next few days I hope...

Going back to Rockville

2007-06-03T23:08:00.001+02:00

Two weeks ago I found myself in the far North - Edinburgh. The last time I had walked the streets of Edinburgh it was the winter of 1998, the threshold of 1999. Just before I left for the south, for Marseille, so there is a certain symmetry to write about this trip now, just after my last entry about Marseille.

Well, up north, the shadows are even longer than in Paris, that's for sure. In early summer the sun in Edinburgh doesn't exactly set it more sort of fades away. Even at 10pm in the evening there is a weak watery blue light that fills the streets. One leaves one's restaurant and is surprised by a lingering glow still present in the sky.

I had returned to the city for the usual no-good reason. Of course I took a lot of photographs as I wandered the streets with my colleagues or alone. On the last day before my departure I made an epic tour of the city, walking from my guest house in Morningside (excellent Scottish breakfasts each morning) all the way to the modern art galleries in Dean village and then back across the city to the new Scottish parliament and the foothills of Arthur's seat, the extinct volcano in the centre of Edinburgh. But after traversing the city I had no energy left to make the ascent so I contented myself with watching people trudging forcefully across its slopes. I remembered the last and only time I had made the climb myself, with my friend Brendan. The soles of my shoes were worn thin and it was impossible to get any purchase on the smooth mossy slopes which had been worn flat by generations of hikers. I slid around like I was on an ice-skating rink. It was only with great difficulty that I managed to reach the summit.

I know Edinburgh quite well, despite the fact that I've never lived there. In the dark days towards the end of my time in England I made constant trips there to escape the tedium of life in Durham and to visit friends of mine who lived there. I was attracted by the cafes and galleries which were non-existent where I lived.

Now of course I see all this a bit differently. The city centre of Edinburgh, at least in the old town, appeared to me now as hollowed-out, empty. A facade, almost. I was constantly surprised at how quiet the streets were only a few short steps away from the main thoroughfares, after the frantic density of Paris. I didn't remember this. I didn't remember either that at 9AM on a Saturday morning that most shops were not yet open, that life had not yet started. In the evening, walking around, it was hard to see anyone who was neither a student or retired, at least in the places around the old town. A cold wind pursued me relentlessly throughout my week-long stay there. (A friend of mine told me that a colleague of his had remarked that more wind passed over Edinburgh in one year than in any other part of the UK.)Nevertheless, the rain only really began in earnest on the last day of my trip, and the sinister bulk of the castle looming over Princes street was partially neutralised by the presence of a blue sky containing only a few scattered clouds....

All the cafes and bars I remember from those distant winters in Edinburgh were still in the city; no changes, it seemed. On Saturday morning I found myself once again in Florentin's, where I had spent many long hours at the end of the last century. But I found it strangely different than before, than the last time I was there which I remember very clearly as being January the 1st, 1999. What had changed? The wall between two halves of the cafe had been removed, making one large open space. It no longer felt so cramped as before, but perhaps just slightly less intimate. I think I wrote a lot of letters there, in the days when I still wrote letters. It is strange how these places continue to exist, even in our absence.

Technorati Tags: Edinburgh, voyages

In Marseille, illuminated.

2007-05-10T23:54:00.000+02:00

I am at the other side of the country, in the south. Marseille. A southern city. I won't mention Milosz, his southern cities, except to say that his words return often to my mind ...

I'm here for a few days, the usual no good reason, a conference, and actually quite a few people are here that I've known for a long time, friends from when I lived in Canada a decade and a half ago. I'm here in my sixth floor hotel room, a few streets back from Vieux port, it's the evening, from my window I see the bone-white illuminated spires of the Panier, and although now it's dark in the daytime I see red rooftops and a shard of water through the gaps between buildings. A few bars of accordion can be heard from time to time, drifting past, but it's the end of the evening, the tourists have left, there's no point playing much longer. Maybe there is the sound of water. And a few lost seagulls.

My relationship to the city is a complicated one. I came here in 1999 from a subterranean existence in England and lived here for two and half years. You must first imagine a sky deeper and bluer than any sky you have seen before. A deep, clear and perfect blue. Each morning in my apartment high on the hill near the Notre Dame de la Garde the very first thing which entered my consciousness in the morning was the blue of the sky. I opened my eyes and through my window my line of sight intersected a clear and faultless square of sky. On most days the breeze, the endless wind, clears the atmosphere of particles, renders everything luminous. I was very grateful indeed after the heavy skies of the north of England to find myself here. I remember a recurrent thought almost every morning for the first few months after I arrived - that I had left for good the place I had come from, and I did not need to return. I felt immensely relieved.

Once again today, crossing the Vieux Port at the middle of the day, I felt almost overpowered by the amount of light streaming down from the sky. No ghosts could hide here in this light. I felt nostalgic for the weak, diluted rays of Parisian sunshine, always coming from the sky at a long oblique angle and casting tall shadows in the street. That was always the first thing I noticed when made the trip between Paris and Bologna - the long shadows on the Parisian buildings.

But it does no good to keep one's eyes too closely on the sky, as anyone who has ever visited Marseille will tell you. Back at ground level, the city is chaotic, disordered, and hazards may arrive from any direction. It's best perhaps to fix one's gaze at point somewhere in the middle distance and walk towards it as fast as you can.

Technorati Tags: Marseille, voyages

Kurt Vonnegut leaves us....

2007-04-22T22:06:00.000+02:00

Mr. Kurt Vonnegut died around ten days ago. Last weekend, I spent a few hours in a nice cafe near my house to write this essay about Mr. Vonnegut and his brother, Bernard.

I was a great admirer of Mr. Vonnegut's fiction from a very early age, and I had read almost all of his books by the time I left Ireland for university in England. Of course, I was a very impressionable young man. So you can imagine my astonishment when I arrived in Manchester, at UMIST, to discover that the scientists in the physics department actually knew Bernard Vonnegut, Kurt's brother. Not so surprising of course - they were atmospheric physicists after all, and were working on the same research topics that Bernard was interested in. Bernard and Kurt had actually visited the department a few years before I arrived.

In my final year at UMIST I had a summer job in New Mexico, which in the end lasted six months because I had problems with my PhD grant and had no immediate reason to return to the UK (in the end I did a Masters' program in Canada). I worked at New Mexico Tech, in Socorro. For the first three months I helped out with measuring radon transport in the desert (a lot of houses in New Mexico are built on granite and are a little too tightly insulated...) For the second half of my stay I was the sole inhabitant and operator of the Joint Observatory for Cometary Research (JOCR for short, ho ho). A very interesting experience which I should some day describe at length....

For the first few weeks I was on the mountain, the only other inhabitants for miles around were those at the Langmuir Labs, on the other peak, where they were doing their wacky experiments with thunder and lightning. This involved firing rockets up into clouds and seeing what would happen, that kind of thing. Observing, measuring. I visited there a few times, and I watched the experiments in progress. Bernard Vonnegut spent most of his summers at Langmuir Labs, but, of course, he was not there the one summer that I happened to be there.

And that is how I got to thinking about Kurt and Bernard. My favourite Vonnegut book, after Cat's Cradle is probably Mother Night. Mr. Vonnegut informs us in his introduction that it is the only book of his which contains a moral: "Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be". Indeed.

Technorati Tags: Kurt Vonnegut

On Mr. David Lynch

2007-04-21T10:55:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago I went to the Fondation Cartier to see their exhibition of David Lynch's work, "The Air is on Fire". (The Fondation Cartier building is a beautiful structure with an enormous glass facade, like perhaps something from one of Calvino's "Invisible Cities".) The entire exhibition space has been given over to Mr. Lynch's works: upstairs there are paintings and drawings; downstairs there are photographs as well as a small cinema designed by Lynch himself. The cinema shows continuously a series of short films from early in Lynch's career.

However, the thing that one notices instantly after crossing the threshold and entering the building is the "environment sonore". Loudspeakers have been positioned throughout the building and they carry in perfect fidelity a continuous series of low-pitched rumbles and clanks, humming, blurred whirring noises, sounds of distant underwater factories. It is all vaguely menacing in an undefined, troubling way. When I visited, heavy rain was falling outside, and through the great glass facade of Fondation one could see dark clouds hanging low over Paris, and a grey, watery light filtered through the windows. You get the idea. (I had wanted to go and see the exhibition a second time, before writing this, but these last few weeks the weather has just been too good).

Of course, for the main part the terror of David Lynch's work comes not from what is shown but what is suggested. The canvases upstairs feature a Lynchian everyman, 'Bob' who finds himself in all sorts of troubling circumstances. In one canvas a man (Bob?) faces a woman on a sofa, in his hand is a small, sharp object (could it be a gun?) and from his mouth oozes the words "Do you want to know what I really think?" the response to which from the woman is an abrupt "No".

Downstairs, all around the walls, is a long series of undated photographs containing the usual Lynchian preoccupations, amongst them photographs of factories and empty stretches of terrain vague. I watched a few of the films projected in the cinema: I saw "The Grandmother" a very early colour feature, which features a small boy who grows a tree in his bedroom, from which emerges an elderly lady -- the grandmother of the title I suppose, although we are never certain, the film is silent.

All of this leads one to appreciate even more his latest film, Inland Empire, which I saw just after I had visited the Fondation Cartier. I was a bit apprehensive, of course, given what some have said, but after hearing Lynch talking about the film in an interview, it certainly seemed like an interesting thing to see. What is truly remarkable is the extent to which Lynch has worked on the film's visual appearance, the way in which forms and scenes are presented, and the way in which all of that is integrated with the soundtrack, which is one of the most brilliant and disturbing soundtracks I have ever heard. Normally I am quite happy to see films in small cinemas in the quartier latin, but that film really demands the latest possible audio technology in the largest possible cinema. Again, like in the Fondation Cartier, it is a menacing, low-frequency succession of clanks and rumbles, omnipresent throughout the three hours of the film. There is only one sequence of around fifteen minutes when natural, ambient sound is allowed to intrude in the film's disturbing and bizzare Universe.

What is it about? Lynch's own response is the pithy 'a woman in trouble'. A thread of plot is discernable in the early stages of the film, but it soon disintegrates into a series of parallel histories the link between which is difficult to fathom. But it doesn't matter; the film is really a succession of films, of scenes. Each may or may not be related to the other. For the most part, we are inside, confined to small rooms, we follow conversations between people whose faces are twisted like those in a canvas from Francis Bacon (one of Lynch's favourite artists). Menacing rumbling noises can be heard in the background. It is not clear how each room is connected to each other room; crossing a door's threshold can imply a displacement in either time or space. Part of the film was shot in Poland, and the buildings and spaces in these scenes are imbued with an extra, even heavier, layer of memory and history (and even less paint). To disorient us even further, every so often we are presented with a domestic scene -- a suburban family sit in their living room, but they are all wearing rabbit suits. Their slightest movements or most banal utterances elicits raucous laughter from an unseen studio audience. And yes, of course, all of this happens at night.

After all of this, one understands Lynch much better; it is clear that "Inland Empire" was the film he's been trying to make from the start; it is the film of a visual artist first and a filmmaker second. It is hard to isolate what makes the film so compelling, but I'm certain that it has something to do with this profound visual sense which Lynch has. The film is so rich, so layered, that I could easily see it a second time. Or a third.

But that is enough for today. Not a single cloud can be seen the Parisian sky, so it is probably not a good idea to spend too much time underground with Mr. Lynch.

Technorati Tags: cinema, David Lynch, films, Inland Empire, Paris

Bulgakov's "Adam and Eve" live from the Gare du Nord!

2007-03-30T00:17:00.001+02:00

Last Tuesday, the 27th of March, is a date which has a certain significance for me -- I won't say any more than that, because I am a modest lad. Nevertheless, I always try to be somewhere interesting on the 27th of March. One year ago, I was in Venice, for a conference. A year before that, I was in the tunnels beneath the streets of Paris. In my bag I had a saucisson, which I sliced on the lid of a subterranean well, and bottle of wine, which I duly opened. And this year? Well, I decided to go to the theatre with some friends to see a new production of Mikhail Bulgakov's 'Adam and Eve', which is currently playing at Theatre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis.

I had read Bulgakov's excellent The Master and Margarita which is certainly one of my favourite books of all time, and was curious to see what "Adam and Eve" would be like. The propos of the story is interesting enough: Leningrad is destroyed by a chemical gas attack, and only a few people survive. Quite different people, really archetypes -- the scientist, the soldier, the writer, the bureaucrat - and Eve.

The opening scene of the play was perhaps the most powerful, most lucid. Our characters are in a Leningrad apartment, and it is only a few minutes before it is clear that one should be very careful what one thinks and does. A totalitarian state. We are introduced to Efrossimov, a scientist, whose inventions are of great interest to Adam and Daragan, two citizens close to the heart of the Party. The actors performances are stylized, exaggerated, and I found myself listening very closely to every word spoken, especially by Professor Efrossimov, the scientist, who certainly gave the aura of having a line on essential truths which evaded the rest of the characters.

But Efrossimov turns out to be wrong about one essential fact: that there would be no war with the enemies of the state. A cloud of gas suddenly descends on the city, and every person who has not been exposed to the rays of Efrossimov's 'camera' dies almost instantly. Footsteps echo across the stage, debris falls from the rafters, a thick cloud descends, and we are in the second scene, a wrecked supermarket, corpses frozen in the aisles in their last act of lifting a pack of biscuits (or whatever). The play moves into its post-apocalyptic phase.

The discussions and conjectures which follow were interesting, but somehow lacked the focus and intensity of the first scene. Everything was beautifully realised, lighting and staging were full of atmosphere and meaning. Certainly the themes were interesting enough: the responsibility of the scientist, the absurd nature of totalitarian dictatorships (which are rendered even more ridiculous when all that is left of the state is (perhaps) five people deep in a forest, four of which want no part of this state at all). So I certainly enjoyed myself, but I felt that the play didn't quite live up to the promise of the opening scene.

Then it was ten pm, and time to return to Paris - we had travelled to St. Denis, a few RER stops out there in the 'outer darkness' beyond the limits of Paris. St. Denis, of course, is where the famous cathedral is, the last resting place of the kings of France, where Abbot Suger invented gothic architecture. Now unfortunately it is better known for being a potentially volatile suburb of Paris. We felt a bit like tourists wandering back to the RER station along the tram lines. But certainly it seemed much more lively than Paris...

Or so we thought. We had to change trains at the Gare du Nord to reach Bastille where one could easily find restaurants open late at night. I was aware that something was amiss at first when I saw piles of earth on the station floors. Piles of earth? I imagined people changed into dirt by a sinister variant of Professor Efrossimov's camera-rays. Well actually these were broken flower-pots. There were many, many of them. We had arrived from the far end of the station, and as we approached the metro interchange we saw that none of the escalators were working. What? There was a lot of debris scattered around: we were inside the Leningrad supermarket once again.

In one corner, a dense knot of people are pressed against the wall, surrounded by the bright lights of television cameras, dozens of people leaning anxiously forward to see -- what? We could hear people chanting, and a violent, unstable atmosphere pervaded the station -- as well as more than just a whiff of tear gas. Or something more sinister? A dark cloud descends on the city. To take the metro, we had to pass through a cordon of RATP agents wielding canisters of tear gas, facing crowds of disaffected youths, preventing them from taking trains back to Paris to eat their magrets and drink glasses of wine, as we were most certainly planning to do. Our metro arrived, and in a few minutes we had arrived in the ancient heart of the city, the Marais, more than a little bit relieved. The next day, the news broadcasts revealed what had really happened -- or maybe they did.

Technorati Tags: Bulgakov, Gare du Nord, Paris, Theatre

Two worlds

2007-03-22T00:18:00.001+01:00

But back to cinema. At the beginning of February I saw two films, one after another, and I realised that in each film there was a scene which was almost identical. The first was "Das Leben der Anderen", the lives of others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film about a GDR secret policeman. This fellow, played by Ulrich Muhe, is given the task of monitoring the lives and conversations of people whose existence is much more interesting than his own, and whom he slowly becomes attached to. And the second one? Well, Kaurismaki's "I hired a contract killer", the only film that Kaurismaki made in English. Kaurismaki's movie stars Jean-Pierre Leaud as a terminally depressed Frenchman, Henri Boulanger, who decides to end it all -- with the help of hired killer, because he can't bear to do it himself. Of course, at that moment, more or less, he falls in love, and decides that life is worth living after all. But how to call off the killer?

Both characters are not exactly surrounded by friends. Mr. Leaud (who got his start in cinema playing the small boy in Truffaut's classic "400 coups"), upon learning he has been made redundant from his job of fourteen years, goes to the telephone booth. We see him desperately flicking through his address book -- which is totally blank. Our GDR secret policeman is similarly isolated.

In the identical scenes, we see our 'heroes' at home after a day at work. Herr Muhe's apartment is almost completely empty. It's full of those browns and greys which were so popular at the beginning of the 1970s. Empty bookshelfs. A television. Mr. Muhe produces a bowl of rice and adds tomato sauce (yum!) and sits down at his kitchen table.

Mr. Leaud, on the other hand, sits at his table which has a tasteful blue checked tablecloth, and listens to the radio while thoughtfully eating what I think are scones. Two of them. Again, its the 1970s, or thereabouts, I would guess. Kaurismaki has a habit of making films which are set at least twenty or thirty years before they were filmed.

The point of all of this? None, really. An interesting echo, is all. Thank you for your attention, and good night.

Technorati Tags: films, kaurismaki

Stop reading this immediately!

2007-03-17T14:01:00.000+01:00

Imagine this in a brasserie in Paris:

I saw this sign in one of the very few cafes I found during my time in India. This was place in Pune. I wouldn't really say it was a cafe, however, as most people seemed to be drinking glasses of hot water (honestly!) or sipping tea (I think) from saucers. I didn't see anyone reading. As for the discussing gambling...

Reading back over the past three entries, it seems that I am obsessed by traffic. I travel thousands of miles to a foreign country which is completely unlike any place I have ever visited before and all I can talk about is the roads!

A natural reaction, I suppose, as one spends a lot of time on the roads. However, there is more to be said about India than just the perilous nature of their roads or the reckless nature of their rickshaw drivers. When gazing out across the acres and acres of shanty towns superposed on tower blocks and shopping malls, one does ask: how do people actually accept all this? No violent revolution here? To some extent, it seems that people must accept their position, perhaps because it is willed by Someone Else.

And the cave-temples of Ajanta and Ellora? Well I spent two days visiting many of them -- most of them constructed more than a thousand years ago, hewn into the rock. The temple at Allora is the largest monolithic structure in the world, so we are told. They drilled into the rocks, and kept going until they had made an entire temple. Here's a picture of the entrance to the temple. Inside, it looks like this. The work of centuries of dedicated people, just like in Chartres or St. Denis.

The land around these temples is arid and dry. Even at the end of February by mid-day the temperature mounts uncomfortably high. I have to admit, whilst climbing the precipitous slopes of an ancient citadel near Allora, I wished, for a fraction of an instant, for the soft rains of Ireland. But only for an instant. (There, that is my St. Patrick's day thought).

Well, enough. Now I am going to go and occupy some tables unnecessarily.

Technorati Tags: India, voyages

Ajanta and Ellora -- getting there

2007-03-03T22:26:00.001+01:00

I'm back in Paris. I returned from Mumbai on Tuesday morning. This afternoon, I made my usual circuit around Paris to make sure that everything is still there, that everything is as I remembered it. I ate an entrecote and drank wine, had a heavy chocolate dessert and cafe, went to bookshops and saw a film. Paris is still Paris, whew. But I have left a lot unwritten about India.

Last weekend, you see, I attempted to break out once more from the pleasant campus of IUCCA and see the land. To see the country. I hired a car, and, of course, a driver: one does not drive on Indian roads, even if one has been to Marseille. Oh no. I had decided that I would visit the ancient cave-temples of Ajanta and Ellora, a few hundred kilometers north of Pune. From what I could gather, this was certainly the sight to see near Pune, if one could get there.

A few hundred kilometers might sound like not so far away, but on Indian roads, this is very far indeed. Leaving Pune at 7AM, we reached Ajanta only by 2pm in the afternoon. My driver was a very gracious man of incredible driving skills (my gosh! we didn't hit that truck!). Despite our numerous brushes with large slow moving vehicles I didn't once feel threatened or frightened, kind of remarkable really. At certain points in the drive, I became sleepy. What normally happens in those circumstances is that one's eyes begin to feel heavy, and heavier, you begin to feel more and more relaxed, almost on the point of sleep and the BEEEP! You are startled awake to see directly before your eyes beautifully painted truck tailgate with the words 'HORN OK PLEASE' written on it in large colourful characters (and usually 'India is great!' beneath that). Repeat this process about a hundred times.

After about sixty kilometers from Pune, there are no more roads. Or rather, the beautiful four-lane motorway that brings goods and people to the countless factories around Pune comes to and end, and there is in its place a small road, one lane in each direction. Every kind of vehicle imaginable to man is allowed on this road, and I was certain that over the course of the next two days I saw most nearly all of them. Horses and carts, carts and cows, rickshaws, trucks, scooters, motorbikes, trucks, men with carts. Men on horseback. All of these my driver skillfully dodged, accelerating fearlessly on blind corners and steep rises.

How to describe the countryside? After the endless built-up expanses of Pune, desert: dry empty land, scrub, hills. But this was the only stretch of land that was truly empty, and it seems to be only ten or fifteen kilometres. For the rest of the journey we were never very far from houses or villages. And that's the very strange thing too about India: no matter where you find yourself, in whatever remote part of the country you are in, there is always, always someone walking by the side of the road. I often wondered about these people. Where were they coming from? The last house was many kilometres behind us. Where were they going to? The next village along was not that close either. At one point we saw a long line of people dressed in bright orange robes striding purposefully through the dust. These people, it turned out, were pilgrims making a trek to a temple which was at least a hundred kilometres distant.

Then of course there were the villages -- for the most part, a chaotic jumble of shacks and narrow streets, always teeming with people. At night, as we passed through one village after another, it seemed that many places had almost no lights at all, despite the fact there were many people in the streets and shops. The odd bulb here and there cast a dim glow, or car headlights swept across the buildings for an instant like a lighthouse rays, but there was nothing else. In many rooms facing the streets I glimpsed people sitting singly or in small groups in darkened rooms, silently waiting. Once again, I found myself wondering the purpose of all that.

Of course, the poverty was astonishing. How hard people have to work to gain their livelihood. People with hammers compacting burning asphalt on the roads. Families firing bricks on open kilns under the burning desert sun. People welding in the middle of the street. People knocking down buildings with (practically) their bare hands. And of course all that stuff to be moved and hauled with carts and animals or of course incredibly overladen trucks. Everything I saw seemed to be this dizzying mixture of intense activity and lassitude; and nothing seemed to have a time where it started, or finished. From the start of the trip at 7am until I crashed onto my hotel bed at 10pm in the evening I could see little difference in the numbers and quantities of people on the roads and in the streets. For those that worked, the work continued without end. I remember standing in a vacant lot at 9pm on a Saturday evening and watching an endless stream of traffic on this road a hundreds of miles from anywhere in particular. I thought absently of Europe, and Europeans, their privileges and how different their Saturday night would be from the one I could see around me now.

Technorati Tags: voyages, india

In Pune

2007-02-21T19:11:00.001+01:00

Restored to life! I've been practically immobilised the last few days thanks to an unpleasant cold. I've slept at some times for more than twelve hours each day. I suspect it was something that I caught on the aeroplane... but I hadn't expected that I would cross continents to be floored by ... a cold. But I feel better today, finally.

I've spent many evenings in my room with the windows open (but the with mosquito netting in place of course) drifiting in an and out of a slightly fevered sleep. The ceiling fan slowly turning. It's strange, but at night the campus of IUCCA is full of all sorts of unusual noises, birds laughing at each other, long mournful train-sounds like the sort of thing you might hear on a Tom Waits record. It is a sound like a long long horn, one chord, and then the sound of many wheels on rails passing somewhere in the distance. A sound only equalled by the sound of a ship's fog-horn I think.

The campus here is a few kilometers distant from the centre of town. Once one leaves the main gate of the University, everything changes: gone is the verdant oasis of Pune University, and suddenly you enter into the complete chaos of the city. The total chaos.

I am sure a lot has already been written about road conditions in India. I don't really have a point of reference. Naples, maybe. But it is different here. Every imaginable vehicle is allowed on the road, including things which aren't strictly vehicles (a vegetable seller pushing his cart is perfectly acceptable for example). Most of the vehicles in Pune however are two or three wheelers: scooters, motorbikes or rickshaws. Rickshaws are essentially like the goods-carrying 'ape' vehicles ones sees in Italy but fitted out as taxis. One essentially moves very slowly very close to the ground in a vehicle powered by a two-stroke engine which isn't really capable of overtaking any vehicle with a larger number of wheels. In a rickshaw, one is certainly very close to nature. But it's certainly the easiest way to get around if you don't have any locomotion yourself and don't mind a life of adventure.

I have made a few trips across Pune by rickshaw. One zooms through traffic with a view framed in front by the back of the head of the rickshaw driver and either side by what's visible from under the roof of a rickshaw -- half a bus, truck tyres, the feet of motorcylists. One has to be careful in selecting rickshaw drivers: not all of them have 'the knowledge' and circuitous trips are not uncommon. Today however I was surprised by the first destination I arrived in after hailing a rickshaw -- the petrol station. Returning to Pune University from the centre of town required more petrol than he had...but only minutes after leaving the petrol station we slowly ground to a halt in the dust at the side of the road. What was happening? The rickshaw driver sadly showed me his hands which were stained with oil which seemed to be coming from his steering column. Breakdown! I had to change rickshaws.

In India

2007-02-12T05:05:00.000+01:00

This morning I saw an elephant on the road. It was at that point that I realised that I was really somewhere else, in a different country that I had never visited before. I'm here in India.

I was being driven with a group of colleagues between Mumbai and Pune; I will be in Pune for the next two weeks to teach in a school on observational astronomy. We will observe some part of the sky, there is a research project to be done, some interesting objects to observe. The telescope is a two hour drive north from here, in the mountains. We will spend a night there, under the stars.

How to describe an arrival here? India is unlike any place I have every visited before, different in scale and sensations and taste and colour. Arriving at the airport in Mumbai and finally leaving the terminal building, the first impression one has is that of odour, of smells, a rich, heady mix of scents which is unique and not at all unpleasant. There are the palm trees and lush vegetation. But unlike in Honolulu, one does not sense the ocean, although it is not far away.

Our hotel was only short drive from the airport, and we arrived very late at night, so I only glimpsed a few things from the windows on arrival, once were past the concrete and brick of the airport - incredible small decrepit building which looked like they were built to last perhaps a few years. People sitting the dirt at the crossroads, in the dark, eating and talking. All the cars and rickshaws, something from the 1950s. The rickshaws are essentially indentical to the 'ape' they have in Italy -- they are small three-wheeled vehicles with a two-stroke engine.

At the hotel, impossibly, it was already 2AM although in France it was only 9pm in the evening. For me, this is a well known-effect of travelling by airplane, of continents crossed without effort, no time for transition. My hotel room was in a well-worn state of affairs, but that did not perturb me. Upon our arrival there, a smiling man in a red turban opened the door for us. No simling man in a red turban has ever opened a door for me before.

The next morning, this morning, I looked out my hotel window and found the lanes and alleys around our hotel suffused by a rich yellow light, sunlight filtering through the smog of Mumbai. I glimpsed crowded, dense streets, but it was already time to leave. Our two-hour drive from Mumbai to Pune was astonishing. It's true what people say about the chaotic nature of driving in India, but I feel strangely unthreatened by it. It has none of the aggressive character that it does in France, for example. The nearest point of reference I have is Naples, but all this is Naples times a millon, in sheer scale and energy. And the vast variety of transports too...

The outskirts of Bombay contained some of the strangest things I've ever seen. Imagine kilometer after kilometer of slum housing, grey buildings crowded together, each hardly larger than a garden shed, narrow streets, all this stretching to steep forested hills in the middle distance, with heavy clouds hanging overhead. Not a single trace of colour in all that. Imagine all of that, then at the same time, imagine a million billboard advertisements for luxury housing and cell phones and computers. India is moving directly to a post-industrial society without ever actually industrialising. Of course seeing all this, seeing many in incredible poverty, makes one think again about how relatively fortunate one was in one's choice of life and birthplace. Things of course that one is not able to choose (and Ireland in the 1970s wasn't exactly the most luxurious of places to be born into but still).

I will write more in the next few days; now I am too tired to continue. I should say something however about the immense good nature of all the people I've met here since I arrived, their hospitality and good grace. And the excellent food!

Technorati Tags: voyages

Kaurismaki's "La Vie de Bohème" at Le Champo

2007-02-03T22:26:00.000+01:00

There's a festival of Aki Kaurismaki's films at the Champo, and I've managed to see four features there in the space of a week. I like very much his works even though until now I had only seen his 'blockbuster' hit, 'The man without a past', which enjoyed considerable success (unfortunately I saw this when I was in Italy, so I saw the version which had been dubbed into Italian, quite bizzare, Finnish people speaking perfect Italian). His films just don't come to the cinema very often, even here in Paris.

So one Thursday night a week or so ago I found myself once more settling into comfortable red cinema seats of the Champo for Kaurismaki's "La Vie de Boheme", based on a hundred-year old novel by Henri Murger. The first image we see is one of a rooftop in Paris, a jumbled frieze of chimney pots and slate. I realised, belatedly, that this film would not be in Finnish, but in almost all likelihood would be in French -- as indeed it was. It was film that Kaurismaki had wanted to make for years, a project that he'd had in his mind for the better part of a decade. The story of starving artists in the city of lights, trying to realise the eternal dream of every sensitive soul throughout the world to come and live in Paris, to create great works of art that would resonate down through the centuries. Er...but...Kaurismaki's artists will never quite get there, it's clear.

This much is clear from the start of film. Marcel, a writer, accepts the offer of the barman at his local brasserie to read his text. It would be fine, he says, to hear the voice of the street. Baf! Before we know it he pulls from his bag a manuscript larger than the latest Thomas Pynchon novel. And probably even harder to read.

We are introduce to the other "artists" in short order, a composer Schaunard and an artist, Rodolfo, played impassively as ever by Matti Pellonpää. There are many wonderful set pieces in the film: after once again collectively hitting rock bottom, Schaunard invites his friends around to eat (they are all of course in a state of constant hunger). On their plates they find a frankfurter wedged between a day-old baguette. Ouch! But next they are treated to a performance of Schaunard's latest composition, for piano and child's police siren, which ends by him triumphantly banging his head against the piano keyboard. Rodolfo is the sensitive soul. We see him painting by his open window, Paris spread out before him, attired in black beret and black necktie, holding an easel in his hand. All artists are like this in Paris, no? His paintings, it has to be honestly said, are not exactly paradigm-shifting. The worst one is certainly that of his dog, Baudelaire. Rudolfo and Schaunard speak French with a strong foreigner's accent (tell me about it), not in the least because neither of them, in real life, understand the language at all. They learned their lines phonetically.

All three of them live in less than salubrious conditions, in the kind of conditions that all "artists" were supposed to live in. Cold water walk-ups. It turns out that Kaurismaki didn't film in Paris at all, but in Malakoff, to the south. It was only outside town that he could find a place which resembled what he imagined in his mind this Paris of "La vie de boheme" to be. Today, all the locations that appear in the film no longer exist. Kaurismaki's story seems to take place some in the 1960s, the buildings have that edge to them, there is that feeling of things which have been well worn in.

In the second part of the film, Rudolfo falls in love -- always an interesting proposition in Kaurismaki's films, where the expression of sentiment never comes easy. He falls for a French girl, Mimi. He returns home to his apartment one evening and finds her sleeping on the stairs at his door; she has nowhere to stay for the night. He graciously gives her his bed and tells her that he will go and sleep 'with friends'. The next morning, we see him waking up in the cemetary. After all this, the film has a very unexpected and surprising ending, given that the tone of the first three-quarters of the film was so light. We are a little shocked.

And the lights came up at the Champo, and in the cinema with us was Evelene Didi, the French actress who played Mimi. She talked to us about working with Mr. Kaurismaki, how they shot the film, about Kaurismaki's image of Paris. In once scene, there is a departure from a train station, a long goodbye. But it was too expensive to really film at the train station! Instead, they improvised: clouds of steam were provided by the staff chef boiling water in every available pot and pan. Meanwhile, shadow heads and hats in a cut-out panel sliding across the wall signals a departing train. Bizzarely enough, it works...

Despite the unexpected ending, I found "La Vie Boheme" to be one of Kaurismaki's most hilarious films. What I appreciate most is the straight, deadpan delivery of his actors; no-one ever smiles, which can create a somewhat surreal feeling at times. Evelene Didi told us that upon meeting Kaurismaki for the first time, his first commandment to her was that she was absolutely not to smile! In it's way, this makes everything even more funny, like in Chaplin films (of which Kaurismaki is a big fan). Fine. I am going to go now and gaze wistfully now across the rooftops of Paris. But I need a dog.

Technorati Tags: cinema, kaurismaki

On "Mare Nostrum"

2007-01-20T20:58:00.001+01:00

The first post of a new year. The year starts in a troubled enough fashion -- unstable weather patterns crossing Europe, high winds blasting across northern France, on Thursday night every train was stopped in Germany. Yesterday morning the temperatures in Paris were the hottest for this time of year since the station in Parc Montsouris opened in 1873. Myself, I walk the streets with my eyes peeled for flying flower pots or loose bits of masonry. Very shortly, were are told, the temperatures will drop to the other end of the dial, fifteen degrees to disappear in the space of a few short days. The Weather, that secure topic of conversation for anyone from a northern shore like me.

But no. We are not here to talk about the weather. My eye was caught by an image a few days ago. It's the new year! So I will include my very first image into this blog. For an instant, a blast of colour. Stereo sound. After all, I am not sitting in front of the green screen of a VT100 terminal and it is not 1992. Do you see the picture? What do you think it is?

I had to think for a minute myself when I first saw it. But then I realised -- it is a computer. That vouted ceiling -- that is a church. All those strange reverberations which start from those two observations. Reassuingly, the church has been deconsecrated, or at least I think it has. But in any case, not any number of thoughts come into one's mind seeing this image. This was the only place that the University of Barcelona had to put their computer?

The computer is called "Mare Nostrum", it is currently Europe's largest computer. The sea inside contains actually, among other things, entire artificial Universes, like the "Horizon" simulation which some of my colleagues here in Paris are involved in. A zillon particles of gas and dark matter are evolved through a few billon years of cosmic history, structures form and stars light up, galaxies condense from gas. It's amazing how far these symbolic representations of reality can take us these days you know...

Hiroshi Sugimoto and Constantin Brancusi: My name in lights at Lablit.com

2006-12-28T23:29:00.000+01:00

My article about Mr. Brancusi and Mr. Sugimoto has appeared at lablit.com.

You can read it right here.

From Ireland, on Tarkovsky -- third installment: "The Sacrifice"

2006-12-26T16:49:00.000+01:00

Another still winter's morning. I see birds shivering the garden outside my window. There is a very heavy mist, or it is raining, or both. There is not the slightest breeze; the air is completely still. If I open my window I can hear the water dripping from the drains, droplets falling from the leaves. The only colours I see are greys and greens and browns. I'm in -- but no, I am not in Ireland, I am in Gotland. On Bergman's island, it is the start of Andrei Tarkovsky's film "The Sacrifice".

Time has neither slowed down nor become irrelevant; it just that what one normally expects of time and event do not apply. A man tends a tree and speaks to child who does not respond; we see the branches of the tree against the sea's blue waters. The landscape around him is flat and featureless. There are stones and rocks here; and around him are dunes and grass, a northern coastal landscape. The man's monologue lasts almost twenty minutes, but we do not notice the passage of time. The man tells us a parable of a tree and a monk. The camera follows him and the child as he pushes his bicycle across the grassy, uneven ground towards his house. His monologue ploughs deeper and deeper, meaning supplanting meaning. The landscape fades away and there are only words. He says, throughout my life I feel as if I have been at a train station, waiting for the train to arrive. An event still to happen has yet to reveal itself.

The man returns to his house. His friends arrive to celebrate his birthday with him. But already there is something strange, a right angle that has become a curve, words which are out of joint. Their conversations are stylized, almost too full of meaning. Light enters his house in perfectly straight lines and we actually notice this. Like Antonioni, Tarkovsky composes each camera frame like a painting, no single thing is not in its absolutely correct location. Gifts are given, it is a birthday after all. We are told: no gift would be a gift unless a sacrifice was involved. Night falls. No -- it doesn't fall, it more correctly oozes through every corner of the house and removes almost all colour and texture from every object. Aeroplanes fly low overhead, but we do not see them, we simply hear the rushing, roaring sound metres above our heads. Danger is imminent. There is an announcement; we see the flickering light of the television on the lightless walls. The television says, in fact, that the war has started now, that there is nothing to be done. That we must prepare ourselves. But -- explains our friend's philosopher-postman -- there is a way out. A sacrifice which can be made.

Outside the film, the real world has faded away. There is no cinema and there are no cinema seats. I am no longer in Paris in the Cinematheque Francaise. That is the strangest thing of all for me about watching Tarkovsky's films, especially this one. If you can enter into the world, if you can be hypnotized by it, it is so completely unlike watching any other film. It is the nearest thing to dreaming whilst awake. It is clear that if you cannot become part of this universe, then perhaps these films seem eventless. You expect things to happen in certain way, for events to unfold in a manner you would expect. But here in the heart of "The Sacrifice" none of this applies.

The film is roughly divided into three segments. There is the first part comprising early afternoon and nightfall; then the night; and then the following morning. "The Sacrifice" is a film in colour, but the night-time sequences are filmed in a colour with no depth, unsaturated. In these scenes only the vaguest hints of colour remain. Now that such distractions are removed, objects and forms can take on their essential shapes. It is a further dream within a dream, and we know that in this particular Universe many things become possible which would not be possible in the light of day. For me this was perhaps the greatest part of the film, this creation of an alternate world in the dead heart of the night.

Unlike Tarkovsky's other films, "The Sacrifice" yields it's meaning to us relatively easily. At it's core is a strong and profound belief in the possibility that there is a god to intervene for us. God manifests himself, but only to one man only. I would have thought that an old rational skeptic like myself would have been repelled by this, but this is Tarkovsky's belief; I could most certainly accept that. I could even hope for a second that it might be even true, that it might be true in an instant other than an instant in the depths of night. It also should be said, however, that after these flat monochromatic images, Tarkovsky's morning scenes are jarring and unpleasant; we find it hard to live in this particular space, and it seems difficult to imagine that both universes exist together. It makes us question the reality of what has happened before.

I should mention perhaps some details about the film, Tarkovsky's last film. I should mention that the cameraman was Sven Nykvist, who worked with Bergman, as did many of the actors. That certainly contributes to the ambience of the film, the way it which it proceeds, the scenes and characterisations. The reason why I found the film so affecting perhaps is because of this way in which an imaginary, dream-like state is made real. That even in this universe there is a certain logic to be followed.

At the Cinematheque, as perhaps I have mentioned before, there are very few incidental interruptions other than The Film. It is a pure experience. After the last beautiful image faded from the screen, a tree silhouetted against the shimmering waters of the sea, the lights simply came on. I attempted to start a round of applause, but found only one taker, far away towards the front. Everyone else seemed too overwhelmed. People appeared to be waking from a trance; they rose from their chairs and put on their hats and coats with difficulty, slightly disorientated. The strangest of all, in that enormous room with hundreds of seats, there was almost total silence. No-one spoke, no-one wanted to disturb the spell. I made my own way through the Parisian night to my apartment. I wondered how long it would be before I could even begin to think about seeing another film, a film which I knew could not equal "The Sacrifice".

Technorati Tags: cinema, tarkovsky

From Ireland, on Tarkovsky -- second installment

2006-12-25T15:58:00.000+01:00

Christmas morning, Tyrone, 2006. Nothing moves. But then, even on a normal morning, nothing moves here. The best word I can think of to describe the weather is "indifferent". It is neither unseasonably warm, nor particularly cold. There is no frost. There is not even mist. I have the christmas gift I wanted - Pynchon's 1,046 page (count them!) epic 'Against the Day'. But back to Paris now...

For those of you just joining us: you should read what I wrote yesterday. I'm writing about the weekend devoted to Mr. Tarkovsky at the Cinematheque Francaise, in Paris. The reading by Denis Lavant of Tarkovsky's diaries was a particularly strange and intense experience. The reading was broadcast live, direct, on France Culture. We were repeatedly advised to arrive on time and to be totally silent during the performance. Mr. Lavant read from Tarkvosky's diaries dealing from the period just after the filming of "Stalker" in the 1970s to his death in Paris in the mid-1980s. Although he was only a few metres from us, we heard Lavant's voice transmitted in perfect fidelity from overhead loudspeakers rather than from his own mouth, which was slightly disconcerting. But hey, that's radio. Slides projected at oblique angles on the blank cinema screen provided an impressionistic succession of images -- Tarkovsky, the actors that worked with with, scenes from his films, his family, the scrawl of his handwriting.

Tarkovsky's life was a endless struggle against the forces of soviet bureaucracy, and he died in exile, in Paris. One particular story: after they had filmed the first part of "Stalker" the exposed film was sent off to Mostar Films, the state-run agency, to be processed. They had to get in the queue, of course, with all the other films. To wait and to wait. But -- incredibly -- during the processing, the film was destroyed. I imagine it being shredded into a million fragments by a machine possessing all the grace and poise of a tractor. They asked for money to shoot the film again. They were refused. They were only able get the cash to continue shooting after making up a story that they were actually filming the sequel...

Tarkovsky's last film, 'The Sacrifice' was projected on the following Wednesday. I'm going to write about, I think, either today or tomorrow. Tarkovsky because seriously ill just after they had finished filming "The Sacrifice". He moved to Paris, was taken in by the French government; Lavant read the letter he wrote to Mitterand, asking him intercede with the Soviet administration for him to let his family join him. His physical condition deteriorated. In his diaries, he wrote about the films he would make if he was reprieved, if he was granted more time.

And this is where, incredibly, that Tarkovsky's story intersected that of people whom I actually know, completely by chance, here in Paris. Arriving at "the Mirror" on Saturday, I met by chance a certain Mr. Seagull; and leaving the film, I met his friends. They very graciously invited us to their apartment where we took toast and tea, like in "Prufrock" I suppose. They have been making films in Paris for many years now, and in the 1980s they had a editing suite in their Belville apartment which was unique in the city. One of their friends was Chris Marker, who knew Tarkovsky, who had filmed a documentary on Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky needed to make some final edits to "The Sacrifice" and the friends of Mr. Seagull were the only ones in the city who had the equipment he needed. They received a tall laconic swedish assistant of Tarkovsky's who edited all night in their flat, departing at dawn, bringing the edits to show Tarkovsky where he lay dying in his bed on the other side of the city.

I'm reminded (as always) by Milosz, and his line about "...the crowds of the unborn/For whom we will be just an enigmatic legend." Milosz and Tarkvosky were real people, and they led real lives, and there is no reason that their lives from time to time may intersect our own. The chain perhaps extends further back than that; I know someone who met Milosz; and Milosz' uncle, Oscar Milosz, had met that other Oscar, Oscar Wilde; in only three steps I am already back at the end of the 19th century.

But now I have to go and attend to the christmas dinner; more to follow, if and when time permits.

Technorati Tags: cinema, tarkovsky

From Ireland, on Tarkovsky -- first installment

2006-12-24T18:09:00.000+01:00

I'm in Ireland. Nowhere near any city, in the countryside. In my parents house, yes. A "zone of low resolution on Google Earth" as I like to call it. One day before Christmas. Outside, the sky is an overcast grey, and a thin mist hangs on the ground. No sound can be heard; a car passes on the road in front of our house perhaps every hour or so. After Paris, after the enormous crowds at CDG and in Dublin this is somewhat of a surreal experience, but nevertheless one I know extremely well, having spent at least eighteen years of my life here. It is a kind of decompression. One awakes in the morning, takes one's coffee and then thinks -- well, what should I do now? But it is not the right question to ask, because the density of life and event here is completely different from Paris.

These thoughts lead me back the events of two weeks previously, when I was at the "Cinematheque Francaise". In a few days it will be the twentieth anniversary of the death of Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky died in Paris. In commemoration, the Cinematheque showed all his films over mostly the course of one weekend. On the Sunday at midday there was a special reading of Tarkvosky's diaries by the French actor Denis Lavant (which was broadcast live on France Culture). I was at Lavant's reading, as well as two other films of Tarkovsky's that I had not seen before: "The mirror" and "The Sacrifice". There were other films of his that I would have loved to see again, but that would mean seeing two Tarkovsky films in one day, and that for me is a bit of an overwhelming experience.

Perhaps I should say a bit about the Cinematheque Francaise before I go any further. It really is a temple of cinema. They have been around for a while, but they have only been in their current location in Bercy for a year or so -- it is a expressionist angular structure designed by Frank Gehry for the american cultural centre. That particular venture only lasted a few years before folding (hmm, am I surprised?), and then the cinematheque moved in. What amazes me about the cinematheque is that it is always completely packed. And by a relatively young audience; it isn't just retired people. Cinema seats are cheap; a subscription for a year, offering unlimited access, is around 10 euros a month; the card that I have gets me in for four euros, around half of what you would pay at the Gaumont or UGC.

The main screen is in an enormous, steeply sloping room with maybe four hundred, five hundred (very comfortable!) seats. I've been there to see, for example, the first of Fritz Lang's "Mabuse" films. Mr. Mabuse, that master of disguise, the first evil genius in cinema. Now this film is a silent film, in black and white. The Cinematheque, being rigorous and pure, of course, interpret this to mean really silent. (For every other place where I've seen a "silent" film there was at least some music on the soundtrack). Unless, like in the old days, there was actually someone on the stage in front of the screen with a piano. In all, it was a somewhat surreal experience. Imagine yourself in a packed cinema with a few hundred other souls watching a black and white film in total silence. And there really was total silence. No-one talked; a respectful silence was maintained throughout the projection. The only sound one did hear, from time to time, was that of the occasional snore; Dr. Mabuse's machinations were just not thrilling enough for them, combined with the soporific effect of the intense heat of the cinema (it's always super hot in there, there never seems to be enough ventliation). I suppose there are people sleeping in cinemas all the time but one doesn't realise it, thanks to the obscuring effects of film soundtracks.

That's enough for today; tomorrow I will write more about the two Tarkovsky films I saw, as well as the reading by Denis Lavant.

Technorati Tags: cinema, tarkovsky

Yves Klein at Beaubourg

2006-12-08T00:57:00.001+01:00

A man hangs suspended in mid-air. His arms are outstretched. He could be a swimmer about to plunge into ocean depths. Except that he is fully clothed, and metres below him is the hard pavement. That he will fall, and fall heavily, on this unforgiving surface seems inevitable, certain, but in this instant this has yet to happen. It is still in the future. Perhaps it may not even happen?

The image is Yves Klein's "Le Saut dans la Vide"; the man is Klein himself, frozen for an instant above a pavement in the southern suburbs of Paris. We do not know what happens next. A thirty-foot replica of this photograph hangs today from the outside wall of the Centre Pompidou, Beaubourg, in central Paris. It advertises their retrospective of Klein's work, which will be shown until February of next year. I've been there myself to see the show, quite a few times now. I have a "Laissez Passer" for Beaubourg and I've been spending a lot of my weekends there. I'll have to write about the other shows I've seen there, at some point.

I didn't know so much about Klein before I went to see the exhibition, I certainly didn't know that he died of a sudden heart attack at 34; all pictures of him are pictures of a young man. Before his intersection with the unyielding earth.

Klein invented a colour, "IKB" or" "International Klein Blue". In exhibition space in Beaubourg there are entire rooms filled with paintings consisting of only this colour. Square canvasses of IKB. But it is a very strange colour. Wikipedia will tell you that it is location in colour space is #002FA7, a simple number, a simple shade of blue on a computer screen. But it is not. It has a luminous, fluorescent quality to it. It avoids one's direct gaze. The edges of a IKB painting are obscure, it's contours are difficult to fathom. A component of this colour concentrates the light around entering it, reflects it back as a deep and living blue.

I'd seen the IKB's before, but never in such quantity. And the rest of the exhibition provided some interesting insights into the rest of Klein's works, his philosophy based so strongly on the ephemeral and insubstantial. His designs for a city consisting where the buildings have no walls and ceilings. Everything is separated by a thin layer of air blown across the buildings. His endless experiments with flame and fire, the attempt to make a fountain for the Trocadero in Paris consisting of jets of fire and water which intersect and annihilate. Sculptures made from gaslight. His experiments with painting by flame and fire. In one (very funny I have to admit) film one follows the path of gas pipes and tubes -- till the end, at once, there is Klein himself holding a canvas before a naked flame. A fireman with a hose stands at the ready, water to cancel fire. Klein even traces the form of women's bodies against the flames of fire, flesh interposed between canvas and fire.

Just how serious was this man, I wanted to know. I thought of Rothko's pantings, the colour field artists in America. What relation did they have to Klein's eternal blue? Was this what Douglas Adams meant when he talked about a 'superintelligent shade of the colour blue' (probably not)? Enough to have tried. Enough to have tried. Meanwhile, Klein's body still hangs suspended above the street, detached from the steel and glass surface of Beaubourg, and the future has yet to happen.

Beckett at the Bouffes du Nord

2006-11-30T00:11:00.000+01:00

Over the past month, I have made two trips to the "Theatre Bouffes du Nord" with my friends to see two performances of short plays by Mr. Samuel Beckett. You know it is the Beckett centenary now, so there are many performances of his works in Paris. In London, I've heard, Harold Pinter is making probably his last ever stage performance in Krapp's Last Tape.

Beckett of course is in that very small group of people who were successful in a language other than the language of their birth. Nabokov comes to mind. Beckett translated his own books back to English, from French; he said that process improved his style. He wanted to pare things down, to produce words which were simple and unaffected. Passing his words through the hand-wringer of a double translation perhaps was a way to achieve this.

The Theatre Bouffes du Nord is itself an amazing venue. From outside, arriving from metro "porte de la chapelle" (behind the Gare du Nord) one sees, on the other side of the street, what seems to be an ordinary row of Parisian apartments. Tall narrow buildings. Except that at the first floor level one sees the words "Theatre" and of course there is normally a large crowd of people standing outside, waiting. The theatre is completely integrated into the apartments around it. Or rather, the apartment buildings have grown up around the theatre. It was derelict for twenty years before Mr. Peter Brook took over in the early seventies. And did not restore anything! The theatre was left exactly as it had been; the seats were changed, but the rest remained untouched. One imagined that a lot of things had been said and seen and heard inside those walls, ancient tired air, old emotions...

The space inside the theatre is strange, and it is not like any theatre I have been to before. I am reminded a little of the unfinished Cathedrale de Beauvais: the stage is foreshortened, and the building itself is very very high. Each row of balcony reaching up to the domed glass ceiling is encrusted with centuries old intricately carved stucco. The stage is narrow, and there is almost no distance between it and where the audience sits. One is actually sitting on the stage. And behind that, there are tall walls painted a rough sienna brown.

Each performance I saw there lasted one hour and consisted of three short pieces written by Mr. Beckett. The very first was classic Beckett: a man who can't walk (he is confined to a wheelchair) and a man who can't see (he has his cane) confront each other. Both need the other in a very fundamental way -- to see and move -- but neither can stand to be with the other. What to do? They cannot escape. They run away from each other but always return. They are tender and violent. Blasts of absurd vaudevillian Beckettian humour provide relief for what would otherwise be an insupportable situation...

I won't describe the other five pieces here. Just to mention that I felt that the first evening's performances I found perhaps more interesting, and certainly easier to follow for me (well okay I admit, one of three pieces was without words - remember all this is in French!). But what was most amazing about the first evening was the lighting. Long rays of light fell on the sienna walls of the theatre. Somehow they seemed to change colour! At one time, they were a deep red, the colour of morning, the dawn. But then there was a clear colour, ochre; the soil of tuscany perhaps a little further away. A midday sun. This all happened before my eyes, but in a way I didn't fully understand, I couldn't really comprehend what was happening.

At several times all the lights went out in the theatre, we found ourself in a profound darkness. But not all that profound; from the high domed window, a weak pale glow filtered in from the night-time clouds over Paris, illuminated by the light from a million streetlights. Then a spotlight would come on, and it would illuminate a human face. Behind that, the century-old shape-shifting walls of the theatre. In that darkness, it was quite remarkable how one's entire universe shrinks right down to that one point of reference, a human face in the void. I listened hard to each word because remember there was the filter of language to be traversed. Time, of course, stretched out in a very curious manner, under this weight of light and concentration. The hour was finished much sooner than one might have thought it would.

Technorati Tags: Paris, Beckett, Theatre

Steve Reich in Paris

2006-11-15T23:22:00.000+01:00

Last night I was at the "Cite de la Musique" to see Steve Reich and Musicians. I've been a fan of Mr. Reich for many years now, ever since a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Different Trains. Before I moved to Paris I had never heard any of his music actually performed (too much time spent in remote locations far from anywhere worth being...) But here in Paris his compositions are a regular fixture, and I must have been to at least six or so concerts in the last three years which featured one or two of his works. Last night one had the unique opportunity to hear Steve Reich's music performed by Steve Reich himself, and his ensemble that have been playing with him for almost forty years I guess...

The "cite" was full to bursting point. I've never seen so many people there before. Leaving the metro 5 at the porte de pantin I was amazed to be accosted by people offering to sell me a ticket for the show. This never happened at any other concert I'd been to! Obviously this was a big event. I took my seat with two friends just before the concert began. The lights dimmed, the audience fell silent, and then - all the musicians got up and left. There had been some confusion over who got which set of notes! One of the violinists reappeared and ostentatiously placed a thick set of music on a stand and left again; a few seconds later his colleagues reappeared.

The first piece they played was the extremely moving Daniel Variations, a piece of music written for the journalist Daniel Pearl who was executed by Pakistani militants in 2002. The first time this music has ever been performed in France. Like in Different Trains, Reich scores his music to follow the cadences of speech - this case, words taken from the Book of Daniel; and words spoken by Daniel Pearl on the video of his own execution. The phrase, "My name is Daniel Pearl" is sung a dozen, two dozen times. " My name is Daniel Pearl". How could those people have done this thing? Pearl himself was a violinist; and when those words are sung, the string section comes to life, it's melody shadows the words of Daniel Pearl. "My name is Daniel Pearl (I'm a Jewish American from Encino, California)". Listening to Reich's music I really felt it as something vital and living, a statement against the stupidity and pointlessness of the loss of Daniel Pearl's life. Not all a requiem.

The intermission -- and then Music for Eighteen Musicians. For this one, Mr. Reich came out from behind the mixing desk where he'd been stationed before, and took turns at the piano and xylophone. Looking at his musicians one certainly gets the impression that they've all been together on this musical journey for a long time. What I found myself thinking was -- my gosh! this is the ultimate expression of Steve Reich's music -- by Steve Reich himself! The piece is quite long, and certainly one needs a certain kind of determination to remain concentrated throughout the entire time. For those of you who know Mr. Reich's music, this one is particularly hypnotic, pulsating, yes, say it -- minimalist -- but at the same time it is full of all those wonderful contrapuntal structures that a hard-core Bach listener like me likes so much. At one wonderful point in the performance, Mr. Reich and three of his collaborators all play together on the same xylophone! At the same time, I was certain that one guy near the back of the mini-orchestra played the same note for the entire 58 minutes....

At the end of performance, Reich and his musicians were rewarded by rapturous applause. I felt a need to stand up and applaud too. Thanks Mr. Reich and happy seventieth birthday!

Passengers

2006-10-04T22:55:00.000+02:00

Before I left for the Germany I was at the cinema -- I went to see Antonioni's The Passenger (the English title is much better than the Italian or French one, if you ask me). The film, apparently, has not been in cinemas for a decade or so, and was re-released last year. It was on at one of my favourite cinemas, Le Champo, so I went along. For the very last projection. The one at 21.45, at the dead end of the day. And just like the other films of his that I'd seen, I feel a need to record here what I have seen.

The film is in English, and in colour. Mr. Jack Nicholson plays a reporter travelling through the remote wastes of Africa in search of important people, leaders of the resistance. That one great interview which could explain everything. But he finds nothing. His targets are elusive, they disappear. The sands shift and he is lost thousands of miles from where he should be. Antonioni, of course, pulls the camera back, we see the dunes and desert wastes, and hear the harsh breath of wind across the sands, see Nicholson's desparation in the midst of this void.

Somehow -- we are never sure how -- he find his way back to his hotel, a small village, a few stone walls lost in the sand. He calls on his neighbour, a man he'd spoken to for a few minutes and finds -- the man is dead. And he notices something, looking at his passport -- he resembles the dead man, just a little. Enough to pass for him in this land far from white man. Surely this man's life is simpler than his? He decides that he is the dead man, that the dead man is him. He lifts the dead man's appointment book and sees the journeys he will have to make.

This idea is the core of Antonioni's film. Does it really matter who you are, actually? From very early in the film it becomes clear that the answer is no, really it does not. Nicholson's new identity is just as marked as his old one. That the film can only have one possible ending is very clear.

Every frame of the film is as carefully framed as a painting. Nicholson crosses ocean waters in a cable car, is suspended alone above the blue waters, unsupported. The film proceeds at slow, glacial pace but this does not matter as there is so much to look at, the buildings and people, the long shots full of space and distance. Nicholson arrives at each destination marked in the appointment book to find one empty square after another. No-one arrives. He waits for Godot. But others know who he is now. At the end, for the last frames of the film, a long unbroken shot carefully takes in many details over the course of almost ten minutes. It is a perfectly choreographed termination to Mr. Nicholson's doomed trajectory. A great film, as great as any of the other Antonionis I have seen.

In Ringberg

2006-10-03T22:36:00.000+02:00

Ringberg castle -- do you know it? "Schloss Ringberg" to those who speak German. A castle in the forests of Bavaria. I've just spent five days there, from the Sunday before last, to Friday morning. An easy journey to make, a one hour flight from Paris CDG to Munich, then a one-hour bus journey. Heading south, to the mountains. The alps. Forests and trees. A flat level plain, then suddenly steep hills, mountains. The castle gate, the heavy wooden door: we had arrived. I say we: I was there for a meeting, there were perhaps forty of us lodged in the castle for the week. A strange and incomplete place. Incomplete seems to be the best word I can think of to describe it. Of course, now, it is completed, but not to the original design. Not what the makers had intended. The architect and the archduke, hopelessly separate from each other who could only be together whilst they worked on this project which would never be finished.

Over the course of the five days I was there, I filled in the details of the construction of the castle, how it got to be the way it was. My understanding deepened. But I was surprised, constantly, by at least one or two ghosts peering over my shoulder, by figures appearing two steps ahead of me, by a long look that I wasn't expecting in place where there was no one. Crossing the castle garden at midnight, past the swimming pool empty of water for decades, I would be be surprised by a sudden shadow in the bushes -- then I would realise, again, for the tenth time, that it was a nothing more than a silent static statute which had unnerved me. Opening the door of the tower where I was sleeping I would be greeted by the architect, peering back at me from his canvas, one of the many self portraits he had painted which were hung throughout the castle.

The paintings, yes, I knew I would have to talk about the paintings. An early period, a late period. The early period carries heavy echoes of all that happened here in Paris, that play of light and colour seen for the first time in canvases at the start of the century. After that, it is man and nature, together. Heavy-handed obtuse attempts to convey the elemental nature of the world, spring, virility, the seasons, life. A great theme. But in this man's hands it becomes a figure in lederhosen happily pole-vaulting over a half-sleeping cow. Or a man in the forest with dog at his heel, surrounded by abundant forest life, hands clasped in prayer, radiant light streaming from him to the animals around him.

On the castle's main staircase hangs the central work, the dead heart of the castle. An enormous tableau which had been hidden for years, but now is visible to all. Two men stand side by side on hilltop. They are looking towards their castle, which either has not yet been built or is finished, completed. It is the archduke and his architect. Behind them far below are the blue waters of the Tergensee, the tiny houses of the village. A dog sits attentively at the Archduke's feet. There is a tense air in the space between the two figures. An attraction, but too many lines to be completed, paths to be found which do not exist. In the painting, the colours, shades, gradation of light and dark are horribly off, terribly wrong, incorrect. It is enough, really, indicate that these figures exist, and not to make them real.

The Archduke would never live in his castle, preferring the luxury of a hotel in Munich; and the architect would die alone there, in 1947, the depths of winter I suppose, his project unfinished. Do I really need a castle like this, the Archduke asked himself at the end, a man like myself, with no family, no retinue? A deal is made, eventually, the castle is given to the Max Planck society, and money is found for its upkeep, refurbishement. Scholars now arrive from remote corners of the globe to discuss pressing issues concerning the distant Universe. Or any field of human endeavour. But when I think of that place now I think of that canvas hanging over the castle's staircase, of these two figures, the Archduke and his architect. Lines not drawn to their point of completion.

"On lost time"

2006-10-03T22:08:00.000+02:00

More time has passed - but I've not been completely idle. Here, in a spirit of shameless self-promotion, are two articles I've written in the last month:

My article in 'Spiked'

- This one was inspired by things I'd heard during my stay in Hawaii during the summer.

My article for the 'Battle of Ideas' conference

- And this one was actually written during my two weeks in Waikiki, mostly from the terrace of my hotel room. Usually after a hard day's working on data reductions....

In my next entry, normal service will be resumed.

Milosz and the beaches of Hawaii

2006-08-15T23:39:00.000+02:00

While I was in Honolulu of course I went to the bookshop. No hanging around beaches and surfing all day for me! I picked up a load of light beach lit -- Hanna Arendt, Samuel Beckett and Czelaw Milosz. Appropriate enough, actually, Milosz has written enough poems about beauty of beaches and nature....and really whether or not one would be better off staying inside and thinking some more. Amongst the Milosz books I bought I was very happy to find "Second space", which is the last book of poems he wrote before his death in 2004. There are many fine poems within, a particularly wonderful one is "Apprentice" which milosz writes about his relative, Oscar Milosz. It contains the following heart-stopping lines, written about the death and burial of Josef Brodsky in Venice:

"So Venice sets sail like a great ship of death,
On its deck a swarming crowd of people changed into ghosts.
I said my farewell at San Michele by Joseph's grave and Ezra Pound's.
The city was ready, of course, to receive the crowds of the unborn
For whom we will be just an enigmatic legend."

And mr Milosz, you great and good man, you would be already gone from us before your poem reached the shores of the English language....and me, I spent the next few days driving around Kauai with my copy of "Second Space" lodged in the windscreen of my rental car. Every so often, when I stopped a particularly remote location, I would open the book at those lines and read them, just to make sure that they were still there.

Honolulu

2006-08-06T12:08:00.000+02:00

I've just returned to Paris after spending the last three weeks, almost, in Hawaii. The world's most remote island archipelago, you know. Under the light of the Pacific sun. One of the most bizzare aspects of being so close to the equator is that there is no long, extended Irish twilight. The sun disappears beneath the horizon, and it is dark only a few minutes later, it seems. Instantaneous darkness. The light switches off.

There is the journey there, and the journey back. Getting there, one takes a flight from Paris to San Francisco, an eleven hour journey which passes over the snowy wastes of Greenland and the far north of Canada. Traveling west, following the rotation of the Earth, essentially static with respect to the sun. After almost a twenty four hours of traveling, it is still only nightfall. Twelve hours of time have disappeared. At the end of all of this, Honolulu airport, which is a tasteful composition in fake wood-veneer and browns and concrete greys. Palm trees can be seen swaying in the distance through the plate glass windows, and every ten meters in the ceiling there is a loudspeaker through which oozes, without pause, an unremitting stream of Ukulele plinks and plonks. Audible everywhere in the airport, no respite. Leaving the terminal building, and the air-conditioning, somewhere after eleven in the evening, one notices first of all the warm, heavy heat, the humid ocean air. From here, there is at least five thousand kilometers of ocean in all directions.

Honolulu itself is an extended sprawl of tower blocks and freeways like most other American cities. The buildings are set far apart from each other, and no useful distances can be covered on foot, for the most part. The downtown area of Honolulu is mostly silent at night, though there are a few cafes and bars to visit. No, the real place where everything happens and where all the people are is Waikiki. Archive photographs show a long sandy beach with the irregular mound of Diamond Head volcano crater in the distance. In the foreground, of course, a man smiles for the camera. He is holding a wooden surfboard. In the near distance, perhaps, a wooden hut can be seen. Is this where he lives? Then bam! A hundred years pass and the horizon is filled with tower blocks.

I lived for two weeks in a hotel in Waikiki, about ten minutes from the beach. Waikiki is a strange place. Imagine living and working in a place where most of the population are on vacation! Or are working for people who are on vacation. My own motives for visiting Hawaii had nothing to do with surf, but rather distant galaxies. The usual no-good reasons that I have for visiting most places. From my room on the 39th floor I had a fine view over Waikiki, Honolulu, and could see even a thin square of the blue waters of the Pacific ocean. Despite all the work I was supposed to do over there, I did manage at least to immerse myself in the waters of the Pacific each morning at around 7AM: I swam for around twenty minutes at Waikiki beach. Much further out from the shore, under the long rays of the morning sun, beyond the shadows of the tower-blocks each morning I could see a long line of surfers lying in wait for the waves. It was fine, for a few moments at least, to be separated from thought, to be in these warm waters, to be in this city free from implication and meaning. But I will write more about that, hopefully, in the next few days.

Deep underground

2006-07-09T10:09:00.000+02:00

I'm interested in deep holes. Passages underground. Attentive readers will have realised as much from the last few months of entries. When I was in a certain north English town almost a decade ago now, there was a deep well in our back garden. It went, so they said, down to the level of the river. We were on a hill, the river was many metres below. One of my friends, an avid climber, descended into the hole, going down instead of up, towards the core. But at the bottom there was nothing, not even water. The hole was not deep enough. We carefully covered the well. Sitting outside on one of the few evening where one could sit outside, chairs above the void, nervous thoughts would pass through my mind about the mysterious dry not-so-deep well under my feet when I should have been enjoying my coffee and toast.

Here where I live all manner of strange things can be seen even at 'God's own noon' as a friend would have said, if one looks at things in the right way. A few metres from where I am writing this, chalky footsteps cover the pavement, leading away from a small one-story building. What happens in there? This building is just a portal, a door. These people who crowd the pavements come from underground. It is the exit to Paris' Catacombs, that fragment of the city's immense subterranean network transformed into a charnel house sometime in the nineteenth century. It took one and half years of funerals to move the bones from the city's most insalubrious locations, such as the Cimitere des Innocents at Les Halles. Ack! Today all this is a tourist attraction.

Last weekend I was in Heidelberg, visiting a friend, and we climbed the hills surrounding the town. At the top, a well. A very very deep well. Or was it really a well? The hole descended 80 metres, and there was no water at the bottom. The druids perhaps had dug this hole. A direct entrance to somewhere else, or more likely an exit, if you were unfortunate enough to be shoved in there on the night of a full moon. I thought of that other deep hole discovered in the foundations of Chartres, at the zero-point of the cathedral, the reason why the building is where it is. Was it that in both cases some weird "psycho-geographic" (as Iain Sinclair would say) confluence of forces had led people to believe that digging this deep hole was just exactly the thing they should do? But I suspect their constant hunger and abject fear of nature and natural events had probably more to do with it, I say from the viewpoint of the rational 21st century astronomer.

The point of all this? There is a parallel Universe, perhaps metres from our own. Of which we are normally completely unaware. There's a world going on ... underground! As Mr. Waits sung many years ago. But is that Universe really just a bunch of abandoned tunnels left behind by mediaeval Parisian stone masons ? Just deep dry wells dug by murderous undernourished druids? For reflection.

On neutrinos

2006-06-27T23:31:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking a lot about neutrinos. Those strange ghostly particles that might be there and might not be there. Millions of them, popular science writers never hesitate to tell us, pass through our bodies every second. Or do they? When confronted with the existence of such a strange and mysterious entity what should we think? Sir Arthur Eddington, when asked if he believed that neutrinos really existed, replied that he had no doubt that scientists would produce observations to support their existence. Do you follow? He explained: (I am paraphrasing here) "Imagine a sculptor before a block of marble who says, there is a head of man hidden in this block of marble and with this chisel I will reveal it". Cowan and Reines had to put their ears, figuratively speaking, to the walls of a nuclear reactor to hear one for the first time.

I remember too Bob Shaw's science fiction novel A Wreath of Stars, which I read sometime in the last century, back in Ireland. Shaw imagines a parallel universe composed of neutrinos existing somehow contemporaneously with our own. (I know, scientific accuracy was not a strong point of this novel). Special glasses worn by mine workers revealed this mysterious demi-monde. A black neutrino star burning in the mid-day sky. Ghostly shapes passing through walls which were really lost souls from this neutrino universe. Weakly interacting. How can something which is so unreal be real? But half a dozen or so neutrinos were detected in the depths of the Earth after supernovae 1987a exploded, the first time neutrinos were ever detected from a star other than or own.

I thought about all of this as I was swimming my habitual midday 1.5 kilometres at the local swimming pool. Even I was energetically doging old-age pensioners swimming half as fast as me or being overtaken by Aryan super-beings swimming ten times as fast I realised that I was, in fact, a neutrino! A weakly interacting particle. One kilometer of lead, even, would not stop me. Sailing through buildings and trees and houses and people and kilometers and kilometers of rock and earth, out towards interstellar space, the cold empty reaches between the stars. Interacting weakly. I understood, at last, my place in the world. I guess Glenn Gould was a neutrino, too...

This last week...

2006-06-21T00:00:00.000+02:00

I'm falling behind! Life moves relentlessly forward, and nothing has been written here for several weeks. Should I attempt to record everything, or should I follow my friend over at The Cataphonic Explorer into the deepest bowels of the Earth? I haven't decided yet. And that pancake is still insoluble, so here goes:

I could perhaps instead produce a stream of consciousness about just what happened in the City of Lights this last week but-is that interesting? I will start on Monday, June 16th and finish there. On Monday night i went with a few friends to Ircam to see the quator arditti -- i had seen them last year, you know, also at the festival Agora, and it was a revelation. Wonderful stuff. But at the start of last week's concert-- what's this? A man mounts the stage. Very, very rarely in these kinds of concerts does someone ever climb onto the stage to do anything other than play a musical instrument or sing. And this man does not look a like a singer. And then - the announcement: György Ligeti is dead! A hushed silence falls on the already silent concert hall deep underground Paris. Or maybe it didn't. Ligeti was still alive? whispered a few, or maybe they didn't. Then Irivine Arditti and friends are there, and they play a piece from Ligeti, strings plucked in the now almost total silence of the salle de projection. It was so quiet in there I was sure I could here the woman three rows over digesting her magret de canard. And total, absolute attention was demanded! And given. Each note was something important, each note mattered. They all had to be heard and captured and understood, otherwise they would be lost forever. Mr. Ligeti may be dead but-

Then the programmed program, once piece followed another, each in its own incredible complexity, layer upon layer, an intermission, another piece perhaps slightly easier at first then dense and layered again, always this immense energy and force required to understand all that was heard, perhaps you could, if you could just listen, if you could just listen in the right way? And then the concert was finished.

Outside, a warm summer's night in Paris, about five degrees warmer than the subterranean salle of the Ircam. Many people were in the streets. I thought for a fleeting instant of Thomas Clayton Wolfe, you know him? Writing about the month of March in Brooklyn, it was so hard to remember that it was ever the month of march in Brooklyn, he wrote, and we couldn't find a door. I may not be a famous Hungarian avant-garde composer, I might have thought, too, but at least I am still alive.

Past, present and the mysterious powers of the Blue Nile

2006-05-26T23:33:00.000+02:00

I'm afraid that once again my eyes are on the intricate web of cracks and fissure lines up there on ceiling-- read my first post if you don't understand. Looking close I see one fissure has a name -- it is the name of a song I first heard as a boy in Ireland almost twenty years ago. I think of this time almost as a negative, pre-time; this happened even before my life began. You see, I always considered the instant I left Ireland and traveled east as the actual moment I began to live, the point after which things could happen to me, when life unfroze. But stuff actually happened back then, on the other side of zero?

Of course it did. I see long slices of sunlight on my bedroom wall. It is very early in the morning, perhaps five or six am, and the light comes to my room slowly at first, deep red lines of light, sunlight sliding obliquely through the Venetian blinds, fading in now, becoming brighter, light at the end of another shallow northern night which was never really night. It is summer.

I am listening to a cassette tape. I'm listening to a song from the Blue Nile. It is a recording I plucked from the air, from the radio. Blasts of FM static obscure the song's opening melody. We are far from the transmitter. The song fades in, a few bars of a repeated melody, the sound of sticks on sticks. The first line I miss, I never hear until ten years have passed and I am living in Durham. You are pretending, Buchanan sings, in his hoarse voice, love is worth waiting for. I wasn't pretending anything! This was, remember, before pretense and knowledge. Heatwave, heatwave he sings, and I imagine there in my northern room that this day to come would be one of those impossibly warm days where one can neither move nor think, frozen into immobility. Heatwave, heatwave, why is it rolling down on the young and foolish? What did I know of heat? In a decade and half I would live in Bologna where for one summer the mercury never went below thirty, even at night, for two long months. But here in pre-history it is different, everything is implied or imagined, the rising sun becomes the sun, the day begins with its promise of great heat, the song finishes.

Before I can rewind the tape, I am at the other end of the fissure. I am standing in my apartment in Paris about to press the skip button on my mp3 player, to skip back instantaneously, and I skip back, forward-- and once again I am in this twenty-first century present, and Mr. Buchanan's voice fills my living room again, I hear the first line of the song that I'd never heard back then, you live beneath another star,
And too much has happened, or not enough. Do I feel the same, here, listening to this song? I do here, in this instant. I skip back and forward over two decades of event and happening, drawing a line from France to Ireland passing through everywhere else I have lived. Distance and time shrink down to zero, I see the long-gone rays of lost sunlight on the walls of my apartment in Paris, I open my window and feel the warm evening air, a summer's evening in Paris, and I return again, evening becomes morning, and yes, this is the memory, I realise, this is the memory which has yet to happen.

Empty plains and red deserts...

2006-05-19T23:08:00.000+02:00

It's already a few weeks since I've written here, and I realise I never wrote anything about my return to the Champo to see the next film Antonioni made, Il deserto rosso. His first film in colour. It was shot in the Po valley, around Ravenna, not so far from Bologna, not too distant from Ferrara, Antonioni's home town.

Antonioni films in colour but there are no natural colours in the film -- except for a segment near the end which perhaps serves the same function as the blast of colour in Wenders' Der himmel uber berlin or the suddenly moving figure in Chris Maker's La Jetee: we immediately realise how impoverished our screen existence has been up to then. Antonioni's vision of the countryside of Emilia Romagna is of a terrifying blasted landscape where the rivers have been turned to sludge and the skies are filled with flame and steam. The cities that we see consist of monochromatic back streets where no-one lives and no-one could possibly live. And through all of that comes the famous fog of Emilian Romana, a fog which can linger for days thanks to the long low level plains where there is no wind, no air to move or stir things. Every so often, immense ships drift along the canals and waterways, materializing by magic, and they seem, perhaps, to offer in equal proportions the possibility of escape or plague.

Once again, the very beautiful Monica Vitti wanders in the midst of this awful desolation, but this time even less cognisant than before. The ostensible reason is that she was in an 'accident' but we know that it was really because of all those microparticles in the air, the heavy metals in the water, the constant noise and smoke. An abortive affair with Mr. Richard Harris provides no respite because of course Mr. Harris is there just to take advantage of her weakened state of mind and subsequent intermittent failures of judgement. And of course she can't escape on any of the ships that slide terrifyingly close to her bedroom window because, alas, she can't speak the sailor's language to ask them for a passage to -- wherever.

Watching the film, I could see echoes of two films yet to come -- Lynch's Eraserhead and Tarkovsky's Stalker, both of which rather cruelly subjected their principal characters to the same overwhelming epic industrial alienation. Like Stalker, Il Deserto Rosso is an 'inaction movie' where the most important thing always seems to be what might happen -- which does not, of course. But I appreciate very much the certain peculiar atmosphere these films have. Each shot in Antonioni's film is beautifully framed and after fifty or so minutes of "beautiful" smoke stacks and power plants or close pans of the hypnotic regularity of antennaes of the Medicina radio telescope, one might even believe that this kind of beauty is the only kind of beauty which exists. It's only when we travel to the distant island (recounted in a story by mme. Vitti) and we see the distant seas, the open sky and the blue waters below do we realise, actually, that this thing we thought beautiful is, in fact, very, very ugly.

Monica Vitti, Antonioni and Paris

2006-04-29T22:59:00.000+02:00

This evening I went down to the "Champo", one of the cinemas on the Rue des Ecoles to see Antonioni's "L'Eclisse". I had been at the Accatone only a few weeks previously to see his previous film, "La Notte".

This is one thing I like very much about this city -- the cinemas. There are around 300 cinema screens in the centre of Paris, I've heard. It may well be the world centre of cinema. You can see almost anything at any time. I've watched Angelopolous' "Eternity and a day" at 11AM on a Sunday morning, or Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev" at 7pm on a Saturday night. It is not a question of "Where can I see film X" but rather "Which cinema do I want see film X in?" And then there are the particularities of the cinemas. At the "Accatone", it seems, they only have around 20 or so films (I exaggerate of course) which are continuously shown in rotation. At any time of any day there certainly showing a film from Pasolini or Fassbinder or Fellini. Probably right now whilst you are reading this.

But back to Mr. Antonioni. "L'Eclisse" is the last of the three films in the series which began with "L'Avventura" (which I have yet to see), and is followed by "La Notte". Mr. Antonioni's cities are strange places. Like in "La Nottte" large segments of film are shot in depopulated, empty spaces, full of long empty boulevards, streets open to the horizon. In "La Notte" all the open spaces are like this, filmed in post-war Milan, where it seems people don't relate to people but to buildings. In "L'Eclisse" we at least return to the centre of the city; many scenes take place in the stock market, brilliantly filmed chaotic scenes especially on the one bad day when the markets take a turn for the worse and a zillion lire are wiped off the share prices.

Monica Vitti wanders aimless though all of this, and responds to most questions with 'no lo so' (I don't know). Unable to decide where to go or who to be with, or maybe it is better be with a book than a man? (At one point she says it all the same to her). As in "La Notte" there are many scenes of elegantly dressed people wandering through scenes of unimaginable desolation and solitude, devoid of any other living forms. Antonioni always likes to go for the long shot, to show us the great space around each person.

The ending of course is inconclusive. Mme. Vitti is bored by her putative stockbroker boyfriend, but can not quite bring herself to just walk way, instead she lingers, hesitates. Antonioni captures very well how claustrophobic it can be to be in a room with someone you don't want to be in a room with, all heavy silences, long pauses. We see the apartment of the boyfriend, really his parent's apartment, and it is all heavy wood paneling, oil paintings and old ghosts staring down from the walls. You should really go but - out there are the plains, the empty spaces. And this is what he finishes the film with -- the buildings of Rome's EUR district, the hard cold lines of modernism. Unmoving. One scene follows another and then-- it is night, and the film ends.

Whew! After all that I left the cinema to discover I was the Last Man Alive. Walking down the Rue St. Jacques towards my apartment I saw that Paris was empty! It was a Saturday evening at 9pm but I saw no-one in the restaurants I walked past, no cars on the street, the only people I met seemed to be tourists and strangely enough even the tour buses I saw were empty! I soon realised all of this is because it is a long holiday weekend and all the Parisians have left the city, gone south or north. I thought of Mme. Vitti stumbling through EUR-Roma as I crossed the rue Soufflot and looked at all the empty chairs in the brasseries. The buildings here in Paris may not be as in Rome, but the human condition, alas, remains the same.

"The banality of evil"

2006-04-26T22:32:00.000+02:00

I've been listening a lot the last few days to Mr. David Sylvian's latest album, 'snow borne sorrow', and one of my favourite songs goes by the name of "The banality of evil". This phrase was first used, I think, to describe what men like Adolf Eichmann did, and it appears in the title of a book from Hannah Arendt (apparently she never uses the phrase herself in the text of the book).

Many years ago I saw the film The Specialist which tells the story of the trial of Mr. Eichmann. Eichmann was one of the organisers-in-chief of the Nazi party, and ensured that all goods reached their destination with the minimum of distribution -- no matter if those goods were Jews on the way to extermination camps. It was just a matter of organisation, no? Men can be evil without being malevolent, that was the revelation. It was just an every-day, ordinary kind of evil, which could come about because Eichmann and his colleagues were locked into in an enormous process which had effectively separated them from all moral responsibility.

The text of Sylvian's song is for sure inspired by these stories, he sings 'I've got me a badge a bright shiny badge/[..]I've got me a club an exclusive club' and then towards the end of the song he tells us that 'your skin is dirty and your gods...don't look like gods'. Of course the sub-text in all of the songs on the album is Sylvian's separation from his wife of 13 years, so every surface has more than one interior, and every song can be read in more than one way.

Cracks on the ceiling

2006-04-23T11:56:00.000+02:00

Students of Irish literature may perhaps realise where the name of this blog and it's URL comes from. Everything is connected to everything else, of course, and in way which we often don't fully understand. Policeman Fox's (and you know who I mean) ceiling contained an exact map of the entire village, laid out in a intricate web of hairline cracks in his bedroom ceiling. Imagine Fox's ceiling, if he lived here in Paris! Or imagine such a ceiling if it showed instead interpersonal relationships. Who knows who knows who.

But that particular one might not be too complicated. I read somewhere the other day that the mammalian cortex only can really handle social groupings of around 100 people or so. Beyond that, I suppose, it is the grey fog at the edge of the village, where you can't see any further. But that can make for some strange effects living a large city like I do. One would like to say that one is always open to chance, to random events, to unexpected things that might happen. That is after all one of the reasons why one might want to live in such a place. But then again, taking the metro or walking down a crowded street can sometimes have an overwhelming effect. Look at all those people whose lives will never intersect with mine! Well, you don't know that for sure, but you imagine it. How many times did you cross someone in the street who might have had a profound effect on your life (and I'm not just talking girls here don't get me wrong!) if only you had talked to them? Ach! But I don't want to go and live on a mountain somewhere (yes, I did try that once, actually). I just need to find a really good ceiling somewhere. From now on, the next time I enter an apartment I've never visited before, the first thing I will do is to turn my eyes upwards....

A partially insoluble pancake

2006-02-20T23:57:00.000+01:00

I went to see the Bonnard exhibition the other day at the newly-reopened museum of modern art in paris. It was interesting. i didn't know so much about bonnard, and after reading John Banville's The Sea I was curious to see what mr. Bonnard's paintings were actually like. (i should mention, of course, that I've been reading mr. banville's books for at least fifteen years now, well before his well-deserved win of the booker prize).

But Bonnard! While european cities burned, while millions were killed, he spent his time in his normandy house, painting and re-painting his wife in the bath. oblivious to the passage of time, to passing fads in art and culture, intent only on perfectly preserving that one instant, a woman's body in water. Sometime in this century or the last, and always at the same age.