Real luck came my way when I lugged the regular Saturday shopping into Le Bouquet, put down the bags with a gasp, took out the music plugs and found bright, fast-talking barman Hugues already chastising me for having failed to shake hands and say "Hi" in the first second of arrival.
He's okay. It suffices to lift two fingers in his direction and he understands that to be an order for a double crème as well as the other thing. The first big cup of frothy coffee landed unnoticed while I was welcomed straight into talk with wide-ranging stage and cinema artist, Carlos, who is also an old hand in the ways of the gang wars that have marked our part of town since before Al Capone was running his own in the States.
Carlos, however, was in such bubbly mood all to himself that I was able largely to ignore with good humour his multi-lingual post-birthday discourse about "the Queen Mum", whom he seemed to have adopted for the afternoon, and instead say "Too long no see!" to Jan, his conversation partner up to that point. Jan, a retired Sorbonne professor, is among the most remarkable men I've ever met, from his infancy in a Vietnam where his father was a French district administrator until the boy was three. That year he was taken hostage by the Japanese, his dad was tortured to death for aiding and abetting the Vietcong and his mother went mad.
Part of the rest of Jan's life story I got in brief almost two weeks back when first we found out how much we had in common on topics as different as music studies in Asian culture and what the more excitable journalists in France's media then had begun to dub "Mars '06" as once their elders had written of "Mai '68".
We found, Jan and me, that our own perspective on the upheaval among students before the unions jumped on the bandwagon was a little too distanced for the taste of those in either rival camp.
Why I stayed out of Le Bouquet, a corner bar and restaurant just a few metres from my building's front door, until last year escapes me now! I used to drop in for the music they had on annually from around this time in the spring; but I never made the time to discover that the place run by a lively couple of women, just opposite another bar where the street killing I witnessed and wrote up two years ago, is a watering hole for very talented people.
The music often consisted of fine trad' jazz bands until boorish locals intent on their tellies moaned and had it banned as too noisy. The bar itself has almost magically, in spite of some attempts Carlos once told me about, evaded becoming any part of the local turf wars that led to that murder and some further bloodshed last year. Last summer when the Chinese moved in to join the fun, buying their way up the street, I can only guess they found Marielle and Francine so "far out" of their preoccupation with money-laundering and forged residency permit rackets, they simply gave up on Le Bouquet!
Yup, this stuff is true.
I rarely write about it because this is a music log, but the street I love living in, like many people from a multitude of backgrounds and nationalities, has retained some kind of legendary quality along with three or four others in the immediate neighbourhood for more than a century. The knife killing I witnessed and reported in May 2003, with some pictures of the honours paid the dead, is among affairs still being investigated by the French equivalent of Scotland Yard.
The reason I've logged little since, as well as ignoring mails from people purporting to be relatives or friends of the kid who was stabbed, is that you might well find this interesting, but I'm still a sworn witness to murder and have no more to put in print that could be sub judice. Some of the mail seems to be in good faith and it's no secret to say the victim happened to be in the car of the intended target, so I'll simply state I know no more about poor Karim than I did the day he died at my feet.
To go on about the turf wars and the gradual local transition in the past three decades from prostitution to drugs dealing, an occasional firearms trade and other crimes I've mentioned above, is to give a false impression that my district isn't one where it's safe for women and children to walk the streets on their own or late at night. It is, perfectly safe. Several bars and cultural centres round here close well after midnight and at this time of year, now the windows can at last remain wide open again, the noise of a lone lass's clacking heels on the pavement far below my bedroom window is a frequent and undisturbed one! The thugs in the area have eyes only for one another and the real yobs and bloody nuisances in my own ears are often Brits and other "foreigners" who come and stay for a soccer or rugby weekend in the hotels of the street and get pissed out of their tiny minds but usually manage to be avoid violence except accidentally to themselves.
I'm doing this particular entry as an in memoriam, if you like, for Karim and very simply as a piece of my "music" posted with love and regard for people like Jan, Carlos, Sam at "the Canteen" (though I've only had one meal at the Pizzeria Pernety so far this year, being until now low on funds), Baudier the Literary Lion who has just published another two-volume tome some of us hope will be rather less gloomy and abstruse and obscure than one of his others.
Last weekend André went to the FNAC cultural megastore at Montparnasse to find out how his new book was doing, only to suspect it wasn't even there since he didn't bother to look on top of the piles of the most prominent stuff, where it duly lay. Once he did discover it, he inquired where they would "classify" it and was told they didn't know -- they couldn't yet. I liked that and hope Baudier also took it for the kind of compliment I'd pay many women musicians here, who hate being labelled.
I have also been rediscovering the district and far too many people I much like in it to stick in a log column while off sick from work and unable to go far from anywhere without a bed where I'm able to lie down suddenly if needed. There will be no book from me about a remarkable area, still one of the four or five genuine "villages" left in Paris, but this week I realised my arrival here to live rather than be an occasional to a close friend or two was more than a dozen years ago!
Still there are people who imagine me moving one day, but they are wrong until the stairs are too much. I didn't wake up today until 10 minutes into the appointment I'd made for a haircut, which is par for more than a week's sleeping through at least two alarm clocks since my new drug to treat a bipolar mental disorder kicked in. So once I'd used a further hour or so until 1:30 pm to wake out of other yuk side-effects and then taken advantage of glorious sunshine to finish cleaning up winter's mess in the flat as best I can, apologies were made to the hairdresser, along with a safer mid-afternoon appointment next week.
Those side-effects. Before getting back to gossip I began writing last night along with some first tidings of the musician who sustained me through Friday, I'll just let you know that before going to bed, I did something silly and found the medicine -- which I shan't name, since nobody needs encouragement -- has a whole web site of its own, with an alarming "Click here" alert.
I did, like an idiot, and scared myself almost back to bipolar mania on reading that the:
"most common side effects that may occur [...] are: sleepiness, muscle stiffness, restlessness, tremor, indigestion, nausea, abnormal vision, muscle aches, dizziness, runny nose, diarrhea, increased saliva, stomach pain, and urinary incontinence [...]
"You may have heard the term 'tardive dyskinesia' [which I'd escaped until then]. These are potentially irreversible, uncontrollable, slow or jerky facial or body movements that can be caused by all medications of this type."
In the first paragraph there, I find four of those effects fortunately absent in my case, but not sleepiness and muscular aches and pains. Last Saturday, by the time I'd got the shopping up four flights of stairs -- 81 in all, I've long known -- my body told me: "Never make me do that again!"
However, I had to bestir my limbs this weekend and still went to a supermarket that is by no means the nearest, since it's the cheapest and biggest. Without Le Bouquet to stop off in for a chat session and to "refuel British Airways" and if I didn't know it was partly the medication, I'd be freaked out by now, since the months I'm getting over are a further excuse not to pack in the cigarettes quite yet. Jan said since Hugues is such a lovely guy bound to service, he would lug my bags the rest of the way in exchange for indescribable favours not up my street, but Hugues even denied that last week I'd offered him 1,000 euros!
Since the shopping was a typical, average load, while putting it all away this time I weighed it, using a pocket calculator. I was impressed myself! The total was 23.03 kilograms, not counting containers of plastic and sometimes glass. If any heathens aren't reading this, that makes 50.77 US pounds -- what is a US pound, as opposed to a British one, which my heathen Mac didn't mention?
Yes. There is a musician in all this.
 No heathen is she, but a self-professed pagan born on the Mississippi about a year after Mai '68. Her name is Tia Knight.
Before getting to her, though -- you can skip away freely -- I'd like to complete a rare "Dear diary" episode with some of yesterday's events and a comment or two on that French upheaval of the past couple of months, a few words for a software genius ... and something I know some of you wish to know about: what I think of France's new copyright laws.
Out of that order, the software wizard is a fellow "pan-European", so he feels: Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann. I've already written here and elsewhere of his work and achievement without naming the man, since if you are a researcher, writer, reporter or even the usual odd mixture of all kinds of skills requiring a lot of data processing and you've got a Mac, chances are you need Eric's help.
My Mac having been as out of order as my brain became, this is an ideal time for me to upgrade some Devon Technologies products I've found increasingly useful with the log and in other parts of my life.
Really, check that stuff out.
My respect for DEVONThink and DEVONAgent grew with the ability of these applications (or software programmes) to conjoin in carrying out their own "intelligent processing" of data research among every kind of file you will have on your Mac or stored in other computer-handy forms and on the Net itself as a superb search engine. Eric is the brains behind Devon Technologies and runs a small firm straddling an ocean and several borders.
I'd been hoping to end my first day with a real sortie around town and working also at home in more than a fortnight by calling Devon Tech about the company's brand-new updates to these key products and their web site. Unfortunately, the day's work still proved far from over, but I didn't expect for one moment that a quick phone call to Germany would lead to a 20-minute chat with the great man himself.
We found plenty in common in views about how Apple operates -- or rather only too malfunctions arrogantly and badly -- but these apart, the talk was a relaxing one for me with a nice, convivial man who is unusually helpful and has a splendid sense of humour.
Bravo, Eric, for all of it -- I like your "music"! There's no point in rewriting what I have already, especially given the new Devon Technologies web site, but some readers will remember how here and elsewhere when I was into Mac journalism and a help site, I always had very warm words for the people behind the scenes like this man, superb software developers.
Of course if I wrote up what we make of Apple sometimes -- while I'm too tired at the moment and interested in other things to pursue my own skirmishes with Cupertino -- I'd probably get Eric banned from further dealings with Job's outfit! And if I meant that, it would be terrible.
This "plug" is here to remind people that for both this log -- when I'm on my usual ground -- and in other aspects of my life with a computer, it's superb to have technology that throws up harmonious links and connections for me and you I'd not have always have sussed out for myself.
There's been plenty here recently about cognition and intuition. Certainly I wouldn't say these main achievements of Devon Tech are first signs of artificial intelligence, but sometimes when used with skill they come very close to "intuitive processing" of the data they find, classify, network and store.
I'm much looking forward to entering the log and music-related things, together with links to scores of gigabytes of music itself, into the latest versions, since I can do it a whole lot better than I did, and already the two programmes have very occasionally
behaved like my "iPod finger", knowing just what to tell me! If Eric wishes to deny -- as I probably would -- there is any "ghost in the machine", he's welcome to put in a disclaimer comment to that effect...
Such flip remarks also take me on to genuinely weird territory again soon and a musician to suit. To get there, I shall cut out details of how yesterday's travels to the Factory and my local social security offices were rendered painful, in the first case, by getting jammed between floors by an AFP lift as if the damned building itself was refusing to let me go before I'm altogether ready for Africa again, and in the second, by very nearly passing out!
I simply had to lie down at the "Sécu", where eventually people proved reasonably understanding as I drifted off. There was even an "Is this man suffering, should we get the doctor?" that woke me out of it, but I didn't wish to sit up and feel too horrible straight away and decided it would be better not to make even more of a spectacle of myself by complaining that their otherwise comfortable waiting seats are not body-shaped! I suppose it might have been an idea to curl myself round the curvy bend on the bench, but then I could have been locked in for the night.
The best bits of yesterday included finding a market stall-holder just outside AFP who filled in 13 gaps in my collection with some of the first recorded music by women at prices that would be too good to be true, except they were. The owner, better still, is apparently now a regular feature twice a week at Place de la Bourse, and she has a lovely smile and a knowledge of her field like Eric's of his. Things like a fantastic Billie Holliday find at two or three euros a shot are remarkable! When I do go back to work, I think Tuesdays and Fridays will require either a straitjacket or leaving all possible means of spending money at home.
Inside the Factory, I found wonderful confirmation the work committee's CD lending library now considers me a prime purchasing counsellor on the strength of this site. Wow!! Could this be, as I reflected in a mail to a friend when everything seemed set, since the library happens to be run by women?
Yes. I did promise. Copyright.
That piece of legislation was overshadowed, however, by a row about first job contracts and education. On the latter, to cut a long story better told by others short, I found sense on both sides and couldn't consider the protesters all "spoiled young idiots" -- like some of my favourite people did -- but I saw the mistake made by Dominique de Villepin...
The prime minister is a diplomat, a first-rate one. I've reminded a few people how the speech he gave at the United Nations to disrupt the headlong insane rush into the second Gulf War -- one reason this log started as an outlet for what I can't say in my paid work -- was not just brilliant. Read it today. It was premonitory. Much of the world may hate France for it, but Villepin said, "I warn you now, it will happen like this," and it all has!
But he isn't a politician. Like some of the people who run the US, he's never known an electoral fight in his life. Never mind the rights and wrongs of the contract affair. His government effectively said with no effective prior consultation, "Hey, France, it is tough shit but this is hard reality! You like it or you lump it. If you lump it, emigrate, get lost. We serve bosses who will give the jobs you turn down to countries where labour is a damned sight cheaper and open to much easier exploitation. Okay?"
In France, that's the kind of practice that starts a National Ritual! And it did. And this one interested me since no "democratic government" should ever forget one thing: whatever it actually does, however sensible even sometimes, it does not turn round on a people, especially the French, and say: "Right, folks, grow up. Dreams are banned!
"Oui, messieurs ... 'dames, mesdemoiselles, you heard right. Dreaming is against the law."
Okay, that's strong, but that's pretty much how the measure was understood by many -- remember, people phoned me last year asking "Are you all right? Is Paris burning?" on the strength of another gulf war, the gulf with no bridge between the nation's rulers and the alienated, hopeless youth of its suburbs. Tell kids like that to grow up and stop dreaming ... well, it happened, didn't it?
Last week the wise Kathryn Petro posted a quote about dreams I love myself, especially since her entry was called 'Safely Insane' (A Mindful Life). So you can see why a veteran social anthropologist like Jan thought my point of view after half my life in this country was worth half the story of his own, much of that in places with carpet bombs and napalm falling on them. But my career began as a social anthropology student and would-be ethnomusicologist -- as you'll be tired of being told -- so you can imagine a professor who was one might enjoy how I hear France.
To hear a lot more French music and that of everywhere else, the new law -- so far -- is rare proof of intelligent if very political life at the top. Last night I double-checked to be sure Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres is still culture minister, since such men and women do tend to come and go a lot over a quarter of a century unnoticed by me if they fail to do anything that's either very smart or unsafe insanity!
I've really kept a bunch of you waiting on my first thoughts about the enlightened approach this country has taken to copyright that led brain-dusting New Yorker Cindy to send me a "Have you seen 'France May Force ITunes Open' kind of mail last month. I've had a bucketload now of mails, comments, questions.
You have my answer in one word. It is "enlightened".
I couldn't give a monkey's toss what Steve Jobs and the record industry majors make of it, since they're into "production" and "consumption", which are market terms. A bit like Villepin with that UN speech, Donnedieu de Vabres really got my ear with an interview he's given about culture. The man is no fool, he understands the financial needs of both we the "consumer" and we the creative artist "producer".
He and his sidekicks are doing their level best to reconcile these needs and see them from a cultural perspective as well as getting ahead of today's technology. I'm giving no long spiel since they've not even started yet. Music first, then maybe the outrageous French value added tax on "culture" of almost 20 percent comes down, then -- to put it dramatically - they plan to take on Hollywood!
So, you can see. I'm on to this one like the wolf I must remember to be, sniffing out every turn and scenting prey in the greedy, short-sighted and selfish. I won't go into it all too deeply in any one column, but I fully understand the issues here and from time to time, I'll keep you abreast of what is going on behind the news you read on other sites.
This isn't a hard news site. It's an insight site. It's a site where I find it a pity that to give you an idea of where my own listening and reading is going, I have to resort to a place called how it is. It's a decent site, though far too weighted to just one nation, like so many things on the Net. It's a real pain in the ass to have to put items there myself if they're not at Amazon US.
Have the people who run it failed utterly to realise -- much like Jobs fails to notice when he's the wrong side of foreign law -- that people elsewhere in the world have Amazon stores that work the same way but don't feed their different "markets" the same fine and crap things? Amazon aren't that stupid! Any more than I am anti-American. I'm just a "snotty-nosed Brit" who thinks he's a citizen of nowhere but one planet and hates arrogance.
If I had a say in it All Consuming, would be called "All Sharing dot org" or something. Do you realise the concept of "all sharing" is so alien to global society that at the time of posting this the domain name is still out there, unused? People who tell me what idiots the French are, as many do -- some Americans rather pathetically forming a sizeable majority apart from the locals themselves -- land on unsympathetic ears.
I'm sure you'll agree that's enough of this kind of music, and thus I'll end with a mention of a woman who's another lovely American and a southerner to boot. My Friday in Le Bouquet began with a guy called Jean-Luc. He's the kind of company I like to keep when walking in the minefields or skirting the quicksand of "weird stuff".
Witchcraft, for instance.
With Jean-Luc, I rambled dangerously, from Sumer (Wikipedia) and its people's ways on the Old Path to Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' -- which once I even read while working in a reference library -- and an article on a part of our DNA at Belgium-based site Karmapolis (Fr).
Even Joseph of Arimathea came into it, so you can imagine how we were slicing Occam's razor and snipping at the sorts of razor wire woolly and weak-minded New Agers tend to get caught on if they're careless. Hmm ... I wonder if Eric's technology will be able one day to sift fact from fancy or make the even subtler kinds of leaps into clarity Dick's robot did in my last column, closing the Great Depression.
 Is the Devil always as black as he's painted? In some traditions, no, not if you start thinking "Lucifer" and understanding how darkness sheds light. Was it predictable I'd turn an ear to the way 'Pagan Presence Presents The Music of Tia Knight, a little surprised to find her available for widespread "consumption" without having to put her there myself?
Truth to tell, while Knight's 'Blackwood' is safe enough, the 'Homequest' I engaged on anew was a source of one tip-off to Apple that their iTMS France has a very bad version, including electronic crackling noises that aren't Tia's. The store mailed me back with a refund and a note saying that of the two available releases staff would further check out what I told them and remove the duff copy.
They asked me to wait until they had. So I did. But they haven't. One of the two versions, as you can hear should you want, remains there for now with horrible extras as a warning always to listen before you download from the iTMS -- just no words telling you this...
Witch music? I followed a hunch, firmed up by Tia Knight herself at Blackwood Manor Music based on my admiration for quirky and stubborn classical musicians Glenn Gould and Scott Ross, both now deceased, when I could hear their ways in this woman. Ross was sometimes a harpsichord player. He was at home with J.S. Bach, G.F. Händel and Antonio Soler (as in this 'Récital de clavecin') and with the music of royal courts such as French ones.
They usually had so little time for "witches" the poor women got toasted. On her second album, Tia makes a 2003 'Homequest' return to such centuries-old origins -- the simple, song-like and short keyboard piece 'Jester's Folly' does this beautifully -- while also using her woodwinds and electronics.
Tia accepts the pagan etiquette and gets filed under New Age too at the intriguing and varied Weed Music download site. Now I'd really like to get to know a third album, 'Smoke and Mirrors' she announces as "swirling with sexy".
'Homequest' can have the same near hypnotic effect as high-flying mediaeval music, using repetitive forms and tonalities still widely thought alien to our modern ears until we simply listen to the music around before any renowned Bach family and a well-tempered clavier. It is an uplifting but laid-back album, you could even say "easy listening" for music so subtle. Some of the tones Tia borrows are almost outside time, like monastic Gregorian chant, a kind of "forever" music, coming and going as from nowhere yet simply being, here and now.
The origins could be traced way back in part to the African heartbeat pulse at one level and a Greek philosophical kinship between musical and perceived universal harmonies. But that's a pretty academic approach -- again the ethnomusicologist in me at work -- while Tia's is magically inviting and warm. It's playfully deceptive, so the title of the upcoming album doesn't surprise me.
The smoke and mirrors will be sounds and how she plays with them. She offers an introduction to her range on a Tia Knight music page, with no fewer than half a dozen pieces to download. The six songs are the kind of high-quality generosity and sharing I've come almost dangerously to expect from so many of the women about whom I write.
They are gifts. I found myself listening two or three times to 'Perfect Love', a track where the opening toll of seemingly vast ancient bells leading into an electronic drone -- very much a "dark age" and mediaeval thing, "drones" -- and overlaid departure lounge-type announcements make for motion amid stillness that can be conveyed only in music, not words of mine.
In coming months, if you're still dreaming with me, I believe we're going to learn quite a lot about Lilith...
11:04:18 PM 
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