Foucault's Pendulum at Musée des Arts et Métiers

Foucault's Pendulum was was the first proof of the rotation of the earth, at a time when to say such things was still almost considered heresy, as the church historically believed that the earth sat at the centre of the universe.

The first public exhibition of a Foucault pendulum occured in February 1851 in the Meridian Room of the Paris Observatory.

It is named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, who conceived it as an experiment to visibly demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. The direction along which the pendulum swings rotates with time because of Earth's daily rotation.

In the short video I took at Musée des Arts et Métiers you can see the "wobble" as the pendulum swings.



Foucault's Pendulum is also the name of a very entertaining and educational novel by Umberto Eco which features the pendulum and also the old priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs which is now part of the museum and is where the pendulum resides.

Free things to do in Paris (once a month)

On the first Sunday of every month, many of the museums of Paris are open to the public for free ... what a great way to get a quick (or slow, if that's your fancy) hit of culture on the weekend.

So today we bundled ourselves out of doors beneath grey skies and wandered around The Marais for a bite of lunch followed by a taste of art and science.

As would be expected, we started with a L'as Du Fallafel ... bizarrely enough there wasn't a huge queue today, and they were as hot and yummy as always.

As we ate our vegetarian delicacy, we wandered slowly through the cordonned-off streets of The Marais up towards the Picasso Museum.



Every Sunday some of the central streets of many of the areas in Paris, such as The Marais, are blocked off to traffic so that pedestrians can freely wander the streets without fear of being run down. So we could eat our food and walk along the winding streets of the Marais only having to dodge the other people also walking around.

Musée Picasso houses a very interesting selection of the works created by Pablo Picasso, representing the projection of his career very well with many of the styles and mediums he worked with, including some of his more well known surrealist and cubist creations.



The building in which the Musée Picasso collection resides is a seventeenth-century hotel, the Hôtel Salé, built in 1656 and contains 203 paintings, 191 sculptures, 85 ceramics, and over 3000 drawings, engravings, and manuscripts in the museum. Even the building itself contained it's own majestic beauty.

We spent an hour or more wandering through these amazing creations. It is interesting to see just how many mediums Picasso worked in, including some pieces containing hessian cloth, or found objects, or sand sculptures, and just how many different ideas he had.

After that small taste of art culture we decided to wander up the road to the Musée des Arts et Métiers for a taste of science history.



I have been to this museum twice before, on previous visits to Paris, so the prospect of a free hour or two wandering through the museum with Elizabeth on a gently raining Sunday afternoon was a nice thought.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers resides in the old priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs on rue Réaumur in the 3rd arrondissement only a short walk north of The Marais.



The museum contains over 40,000 objects including an original version of Foucault's Pendulum.

But it also contains the earliest scientific tools such as astrolabes; numerous weights and measures; the evolution of computers (from the abacus to Cray supercomputers and on to the first IBM and Apple desktop computers and smaller models), the evolution of the science of transport (from bikes to cars to satellites and mars landers); a history of communications and construction and much, much more ... all very interesting.



Perhaps the science nerdiness got too much for Elizabeth towards the end, plus she had some work waiting for her back at the apartment, but we both (well, maybe especially me) had an enjoyable afternoon. It was a fun, and virtually free, way to spend an overcast day.

Deerhoof V's Dan Deacon @ Villette Sonique

We were out of Paris on another side trip to the UK for a few days and as a consequence missed most of the Villette Sonique festival, but we were back in Paris in time to catch the last day and to attended a couple of the sets of free music in the park.



We arrived on a warm spring afternoon to the guitar groove of Deerhoof skimming across the waters of Canal de l’Ourcq as we walked along the path between the canal and the Parc de la Villette.

It was a fun and uptempo set from Deerhoof which greeted us, but sadly it was also a very short performance, not helped by our long walk from the centre of the city following Canal St Martin up to Parc de la Villette on the outskirts of the north-east arrondissements of Paris. But we only missed the first 10 or 15 minutes of their set and it still seemed rather short. There was also a very large crowd, perhaps larger than expected? The PA was rattling as it tried to project the sound of Deerhoof across the audience and into the park below and behind us.



The spaces within Parc de la Villette were full of groups of friends and families enjoying the lovely warm day and listening to the sounds emanating from the various corners of the park. As I watched Deerhoof I could see a small group of men practicing martial arts on a park below, another couple were playing badminton, two children were playing soccer, numerous groups were stretched out on the grass (away from the performance but still within earshot) enjoying their food and drinks … it was all very nice.

As were Deerhoof. They did their best to advise the local punters, in French, when and where their next gig in France would be and they played a well received set with a couple of encores requested. They even played a cover version of Canned Heat's "Going Up The Country" which was a fun treat.

Dan Deacon was in many ways the opposite of this experience. The band were still setting up and doing their sound check, on a separate stage to Deerhoof, even after Deerhoof had played several encores and the audience had made the five or so minute walk between the two stages. I even had time to queue for a beer, and the queues were long and slow, although much better than the 30-40 minutes (literally) it took to buy a beer at the Jesus Lizard gig.



When the Dan Deacon ensemble sound check was finally completed, and we had made it closer to the stage, there were still long and specific requirements from Dan Deacon … all spoken unapologetically in English … for the audience to:-
i. all raise their hands
ii. all walk towards the tallest person in the audience
iii. all place their hands on the head of the person in front of them
iv. all turn to face the stage and walk towards it
v. all do something else very specific which had nothing to do with the band playing any music.

This was before they had even played their first song proper. It was a bit like being in kindergarten.

We were eventually treated to a very small number of quite fun tunes when all too soon it was time for Dan Deacon to get the audience (again, all in English, he even made a joke about the inabilities of Americans to converse in any language other than English) to:-
i. form a circle
ii. step back 5 steps to make the space within the circle bigger
iii. now step back 3 more steps to make it bigger still
iv. he chose two audience members
v. who were required to name their “dance team”

Finally the band started up again, and again it was a collection of fun, uptempo and dance based tunes which Elizabeth and I and the audience around us all enjoyed thoroughly.



Dan Deacon has a table full of some very cool toys and he seems to have fun playing with them. He is constantly manipulating his voice with some sort of vocoder, has a theremin-esque effect which squeaks and squeals, a number of delay and chorus effects … all very cool. He also has a huge band, who also seem to have a fun time. Plus there are two drummers, which is always a powerful live experience. In some ways it reminded me of Caribou.

But then it was time for a second dance contest … again there were intricate requirements:-
i. the audience had to form an obtuse triangle
ii. while standing only on their right foot
iii. unless they were on the right hand side of the stage, in which case they had to hop on their left foot
iv. while humming le Marseille
v. in the key of B# (not in the key of C)
vi. but if they were at the back of the crowd they had to stand on their head
vii. while whistling the keyboard refrain from Je T’aime Moi Non Plus

… I’d stopped paying attention to these overly specific and foolish directions by this stage … again all spoken in English, and again the audience seemed to take this in their stride, although there were ever growing cries to hear some more music.

Dan Deacon and his dozen dudes should have just played their fun tunes.

I started to wonder why the Deerhoof set was so short in comparison. They just played, tried to speak to the locals, and had a fun time. I’m sure Dan Deacon spent the same amount of time setting up and demanding the audience play kindergarten games (in machine gun fire English) as Deerfhoof were playing for.

But it was great fun to see some cool music on a warm spring afternoon in a park on the far edge of Paris.

We walked home along the canals which lead back to the centre of Paris and the Seine, watching the hundreds of people along the path enjoying their picnic dinners in groups large and small.

The weather is certainly getting better all the time.

Joyeux Anniversaire à Moi

Yesterday was my birthday, celebrating 47 years of mostly enjoyable life experiences with only the occasional poignant moments, and also celebrating 22 years (almost to the day) since I started travelling the world.

For various reasons … accrued long service leave; a habit of converting all overtime into holidays rather than being paid in cash (and I work in IT, with mainframe computers, so there is lots of on-call and overtime to be worked, at times when everyone else is asleep or enjoying their weekends); regularly leaving jobs and taking extended periods of time off work; following my brilliant research academic wife on her research and conference tours of Europe and the USA … I have been leaving Australia and adventuring overseas for about two months every two years on average since I first got a taste of life overseas.

And it is this which I think is important in life and what I like to celebrate; seeing new people and places; experiencing (to some extent) other cultures; hopefully making new friends … I also love meeting old friends in other countries; seeing life from another perspective; wandering through different markets or architecture. So I like to travel and do so as often as I can.



It has been even better in recent years. This particular trip we are in Paris for 4.5 months and no longer have a permanent home in Australia. Last year we were in Los Angeles for 6 weeks, with the occasional side trip to Vancouver, Las Vegas or the Grand Canyon. We spent three months of the “summer” of 2007 (wetter than any of our winters in Australia) in Exeter which also included many side trips to Europe. Anyhoo, I digress.

So, what did I do to celebrate the (to others perhaps very scary) milestone of 47 years on this planet? I believe one should celebrate their birthdays, not necessarily with gifts or expenses, but with a joy de vivre and a search for experiences. But what did I do, you (the solitary reader of this blog) ask yet again? I went to the third largest “green space” (i.e. the third most heavily wooded, I would stop short of calling it a “park”) in Paris, which also happens to be a place for the dead … Père Lachaise cemetery.



Don’t read anything into my visiting a cemetery to celebrate my birthday, I have visited many cemeteries around the world, including the three main cemeteries in Paris (Père Lachaise, Montparnasse and Montmartre) and still plan to revisit Montparnasse Cemetery where Serge Gainsbourg (amongst one or two others) is buried. I enjoy wandering through and looking at many of the ancient structures these cemeteries offer. Père Lachaise particularly contains some very gothic tombs and statuary.



We started the day with a late breakfast of a half bottle of very fancy French champagne, a selection of patisseries and some lovely fresh fruit. Our journey across Paris was on foot, we walked the few kilometres from the 4th arrondissement in the centre of Paris where we live, through the 11th arrondissement which contains the Bastille and up to the 20th arrondissement which Père Lachaise dominates.

Père Lachaise cemetery was created in 1803 and contains 47 hectares of hillside consisting of trees, tombs, wreaths, roses, gravestones, gravel, cobbled paths and crows. It contains the remains (or tombs) of personages such as the famous doomed lovers Héloise & Abélard (currently under repair); artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Max Ernst, Camille Pissaro and Eugène Delacroix; performers including Edith Piaf, Frédéric Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Maria Callas; the writers Marcel Proust, Molière, Honore de Balzac, Colette … and for the English speakers amongst the ruins, the remains of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison.



I first visited Père Lachaise on my first visit to Paris in 1987. At that time my best mate and I were driving across Europe and we met up in Paris for a few days with two of our closest friends, who were on a separate world tour. Together the four of us celebrated our world travels with a picnic lunch in a quiet corner of the cemetery with Dr Ant Ritti.

Today I was celebrating with my darling wife, and as fate often decrees with the coincidences of life, on our wanderings off the cobble-stoned paths (as is my want) we stumbled across an area which was vaguely familiar and contained the remains of Dr Ant Ritti. An interesting coincidence indeed considering the fact that Père Lachaise cemetery shelters the remains of some 70,000 “people”.

The cemetery is still in use today, and apart from the groups of mourners attending to their own recently departed, the largest number of visitors in any one location were tourists who flocked to the (now fenced off) grave of Jim Morrison.



I had a wonderful warm spring day ambling through the ancient tombs, many decorated with rose bushes wafting sweet scents. Five hours later we walked home through Paris again, taking a different route this time, stopping for a very nice millefeuille at one of the nicest patisseries in Paris, Lenòtre.

They are two of my favourite things to do in Paris, taste the patisseries and bread products and to just walk the streets of Paris … and always along a different path.

The Jesus Lizard V's Sunn O))) V's Men Without Pants @ Villette Sonique

Villette Sonique is an annual music event in Paris aimed showcasing new and old Rock, Pop and Electro artists ... this blurb is from their website

Will Future in music pass by a return to primitive instincts? These days, everybody speaks about tribalism, tropicalism and the new sound sensations quest. Villette Sonique 2009 takes place right in this mutation with a line up out of the usual musical boundaries. Following a breathtaking 2008 edition with rare bands performing amazing concerts (Devo, Shellac, Throbbing Gristle), this year’s leitmotiv is an unstoppable metronome.

We caught the opening night in the Grand Halle which was a bit of a rock all-sorts evening.



Men Without Pants were playing as we arrived, purported to be a "supergroup" composed of Dan The Automater (Gorillaz) and Russel Simmins (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion).

The live band only featured Russel Simmins. I love JSBX, they are a favourite live experience (especially when Jon Spencer is on fire with his "Elvis meets Jerry Lee via the bastard soul of a satanically possessed southern preacher man" persona) but Men Without Pants had none of that attitude. Simmins is a great drummer, but there were only a few interesting songs, and there was little interaction with the crowd. Russel Simins just walked off stage as soon as he had finished drumming for the last track without even acknowledging the crowd, or the rest of the group who were still doing their thing. They certainly weren't a supergroup, go and see Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.



I have seen Sunn O))) before and know what to expect from their performance ... lots of extremely distorted, slowly strummed, heavily sustained chords, lots of smoke and the sartorial splendour of a medieval monk. That was exactly what we got.

Tonight SUNN O))) were performing The GrimmRobe Demos, but to my ears it wasn't that different to the gig I saw in Brisbane when they were touring Altar, an album they recorded and toured with Boris.

There was much smoke, much raised fists and slow punching of the air, much slow sustained, distorted chords, much more smoke, much holding guitars aloft to increase the grace bestowed upon them by their god of sustained, distorted chords, much more smoke ... and robes with hoods.

Sunn O))) are a bit of a joke for me ... a Jim Carrey type of joke with only one facet; he pulls "funny" faces; they play slowly strummed, heavily sustained, majorly distorted chords. I get it. It is a physical as well as aural experience. I get it.

If you haven't seen Sunn O))) before, here's a short video which will give you some idea (apart from the volume level and it's physical impact ... that sort of crapped out on my small digital camera).



I like their guitar sound but after 15 minutes it gets a bit repetitive. And they have the stage presence of watching a fire without the flame. There was even some booing after the set finished, although there were many fans with fists aloft at the front of the stage who seemed (un)happy enough.



Then The Jesus Lizard took to the stage as a part of their current reunion tour. Opening with a diatribe on the crappiness of the first two bands, they proceeded to tear the venue apart.

There was much stage diving, crowd surfing and spitting, and that was just from front man David Yow ... the audience joined in too. The power and energy from the stage was palpable.

Microphones were destroyed, kids kept invading the stage, sweat, spit and beer covered the stage, bodies leapt and were passed over one another, and still the music threatened and pounded.

The Jesus Lizard were the saving band of the night. Go and see them on their reunion tour.

Pierre Henry @ Théâtre de la Cité Internationale

Almost a month ago we were lucky enough to see one of the elder statesmen of electronic and experimental music in France, Pierre Henry, performing live at a six night spectacular of music and dance celebrating his amazing creations at Théâtre de la Cité Internationale.

Pierre Henry was possibly the first formally educated musician to devote his energies to the (then) newly evolving electronic medium. He was a member of the first group responsible for the development of musique concrète, one which often utilises "found sounds" and "synthesised sounds" rather than traditional instruments or voices and it does not necessarily contain elements traditionally thought of as 'musical', such as melody, harmony or rhythm.

At the event there were two dance performances using music created by Pierre Henry, but I'm not a big fan of dance so won't say very much about this. The man himself, assisted by Bernadete Mangin, played pieces which - over the six nights - spanned his career from 1950 until 2006.

For his performance, Pierre Henry was assisted to the front row of the audience, also facing the stage. On the dark stage there were a large collection of different speakers all facing towards the artist and the audience.

The room was darkened and (for our night) found sounds, creaking doors and windows, entered from the speakers on stage and surrounding the audience. We were then treated to an hour of electronic squeeks and belches, found sounds and synthesised stabs. It was great fun to see such a master at work.

Among his best known works is the experimental 1967 album Messe pour le temps présent, one of several co-operations with choreographer Maurice Béjart, which features the popular track "Psyché Rock."

But I can safely say that Pierre Henry's best-known influence on contemporary popular culture is via the theme song of the TV series Futurama . The tune is inspired by / a tribute to / ripped off from (choose your own position) Henry's 1967 composition "Psyché Rock".

Il Fait Beau

It seems to have been months in coming, but the last few days in Paris have been lovely. The sun is constantly shining, and even warm. In fact there has been lots of sunshine all day long.

Not that even the cooler or wet days (of which there have been plenty since we arrived in March) would keep me inside for too long, most days I like to just wander around Paris for at least a few hours (as I have already mentioned). And many days would have a few fine hours here and there, you just had to choose your moments and occasionally travel with an umbrella.

But now that the weather is improving we are also able to sit out on the grass (without getting wet bums from the aforementioned rain).



So there are now more nice locations to do my french study in .. in the absence of the language school I've been enrolled in providing any quality tuition lately ... but that's another story which I hope has a happier ending than the one which currently seems to be suggested.

And with daylight savings implemented even the nights are still day.

On the daylight savings front, I was very disappointed to see that a recent referendum in my home state of Western Australia voted against implementing daylight savings, yet again. It seems most people in WA want to live in the past.

Anyhoo ... daylight savings in Paris has enabled us to spend much time outside into the evening.



So we can take our meals outside, and with a short stroll from the apartment down to the Seine we can join the hundreds of others eating, drinking, chatting and singing along the waters edge.

I'm sure as spring morphs into summer over the remaining two months we have left in Paris that there will be much more of this. Woo Hoo!