Play it again - that song that I can't get off my mind

Last year, I was part of a special production celebrating the musical career of Catherine Harsono, produced by the Bangkok Music Society: Catherine - An enchanted musical journey. I sang in a surprise number prepared just for Catherine based on Gershwin Bros' melody Lady be good.

Every Sunday evening the radio channel France Musiques broadcasts a show called Le jazz dans la peau (Jazz under my skin). Every show is built around a jazz standard. As the show started tonight, I was thinking how Lady be good would be a good theme for this show; it's been popular with lots of jazz artists. And lo behold! the theme tonight was Lady be good.

If you're feeling blue, listen to this great show built around this and other famous Gershwin standards: swing, blues, ragtime, ballad, scat, fiddle, guitar, saxophone, double bass, ukelele, piano, Ella... I'm sure you'll feel cheerier afterwards.
Next week, there'll be another jazzy theme and variations on this show.

Play it again
The Eyeliners, Sealed with a kiss, Lookout

Photo: © Michael Carter and Bangkok Music Society

Behold the sea!

This week end I went to visit my grand-aunts Odette and Yvette in their family beach bungalow in Mimizan-Plage in the Landes region of Southwest France. Their house is located below the great sand dune, a gentle five-minute stroll up to the view above.

I had a very restful week end of sunbathing, jogging along the beach and a few extremely quick dips in the water; it was still very cold.

Aunties Yvette and Odette are the only family members I have left of my grandparents' generation. They are the ones who got my generation used to the long hearty family meals of traditional French food, which I still cook for myself when I have guests today. They are the origin of most of the recipes I keep in my cooking repertoire. When in France I will call them if I need an urgent cooking tip.

Most striking for me was how the local meat cuts they got from their butcher this week end made the lamb shank and the pork roast tasted very different from what I usually prepare in Paris, although I use the same recipe that came from them through my mother. It was further evidence for me that quality of food is clearly linked to its origin. For more information on food quality linked to origin, click here.

Symphony no. 1 "A sea symphony"
Ralph Vaughan Williams
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, EMI classics

Let us drink and be merry

Having come back to Paris, I am slowly forming my network of friends again. Last Thursday evening I had the great pleasure to get back together with two university class mates after four or perhaps even six years since I last saw them.

It was wonderful to be with Thibault and Benjamin again. Thib took us to a meat restaurant next to Les Halles where all the staff are dressed as butchers and there is meat being roasted on vertical skewers where you would usually expect a display of alcohol bottles to be: behind the bar. This place is not for vegetarians! The place is called Le louchebem. The name is French butcher's slang for "The butcher".

Great meat cuts, fine desserts, lots lots lots of wine. Thib finished the meal with a "baba au rhum", a pear-shaped sponge cake cut in half and doused in rhum. The house gave him a bottle of rhum to pour over the cake, but most of the bottle was poured into our glasses and drunk.

I was very happy riding home on my bicycle that night.



Photo: © Thibault Viremouneix and the anonymous butcher-waiter who took it.

Let us drink and be merry
George Berg
See p.4 of http://www2.cpdl.org/wiki/images/8/8f/Drinking.pdf

I'm gonna chow down my vegetables

I'm experimenting this year by only buying produce that is in season and locally produced.

During the week, I eat a big lunch at the canteen so I only have soup, salad, cheese and a fruit for dinner. I eat a more diverse menu during the week end, but as I still live alone, the shopping basket stays small. See this week's shopping in the photo.

I go to a nearby organic market every Saturday morning and try to buy fruits and vegetable that are in season. I'm not a fundamentalist though: I do not limit myself to the 100-mile circumference that some localists advocate. Instead, I buy anything that's produced in France.

Still, the range is rather limited in early spring. The hardest is doing without tomatoes and bell peppers which are usually staple vegetable for me. I'll have to wait a bit. They're still imported from Spain or Italy now.

Vega- Tables
Smile, Brian Wilson, Nonesuch Variete

Hallelujah!

After one whole month, France Telecom has finally managed to get my Internet connection to work at home! I was also relieved to see that the 1st April connection was not a joke.

I sometimes take a break from Internet by going on an unconnected holiday for a week. However, in this day and age when moving into a large modern city entails so much administrative hassle, not having easy Internet access is really frustrating. One good thing though: I got to catch up on my novel reading last month.

Happy Easter!

Hallelujah chorus
Georg Friedrich Haendel. Messiah.
Les musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski, Archiv.

Oh happy happy!

Last Friday I went to listen to my second Parisian concert after coming back.

It was an evening of Haendel opera arias by a quartet of already famous young singers at the Theâtre des Champs Elysées: Sandrine Piau, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Philippe Jaroussky, Topi Lehtipuu and the Concert d'Astrée, all conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm.

I decided to go at the last minute. There were no more seats available in the room. So I bought a €5 seat at the box office. The Theâtre des Champs Elysées is nearly circular. The cheapest seats are literally above the stage in two small dark rooms on the left and right sides of the hall. The audience there can only listen. If one wants to see, one has to bend over the side of the open window and look down on the 10m drop over the stage: not for those who are afraid of heights. This would probably be banned in health-and-safety conscious UK.

My seat was at the back of the room so I was not even tempted to bend over to look at the artists. I had all seen them in the past already anyway. The sound in this small dark listening chamber was a bit muffled but pure. I closed my eyes and listened to the beautiful arias. I did find out I was missing out on something visual as the rest of the room was laughing at some points so although the concert was not staged, something must have been happening on stage.

One good thing with this position overlooking the rest of the audience rather than the stage, is that one can spot the seats left empty. At the intervall, I changed seat for one I had spotted right in the centre of the second balcony. Not only could I now see the stage and the singers, but all the harmonies in the voices suddenly came out much better. The ladies' voices in particular sounded much richer now. The comedy on stage came from singers playing with the height of the music stands between numbers.

A great baroque concert of runs, affects and fun. I went home completely elated on my bicycle, driving through nearly empty streets past the Eiffel Tower, the Champs de Mars and behind Montparnasse back home. I was in such an intellectual high that I hardly noticed it was raining and that I was all wet.

Happy we
Haendel, Acis and Galatea
William Christie and Les Arts Florissant, Erato

Help me make up me mind

I've come back to Thailand for a week of work with FAO, facilitating the second workshop of a regional project on food consumer market research. The project involves researchers from four countries: Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Yunnan Province of China. From the various interests of the national researchers, the objective was to come up together with a few common research problems that we might all resolve in the four different countries using the same research methodology.

To achieve this convergence, I proposed to use the world café method, which we implemented yesterday. World café involves breaking up into small groups seated at separate tables with a large sheet of paper on which to take notes. All groups discuss a common question separately. Participants then shift tables so as to share the findings between groups while one person - the table host - permanently stays at a table to report previous discussions to newcomers at the table. For more information, visit the KS-toolkit.

We are a small group of 14; I chose to set up three tables of four or five people. The common question to be discussed was: "What are the COMMON research problems that could be investigated in ALL four countries?" I had anticipated that the world café method would allow all participants to become aware of all the wishes of their colleagues, and we would use another facilitation method to do the convergence of views to select a few common research problems for all countries to implement.
In fact, the convergence process happened naturally through the world café. The sheets of paper on the tables were scribbled with all the various ideas coming up from participants but the discussions being held at the three tables also allowed everybody to spot the common research problems that would be relevant for all four countries and the three food products we were working on.
When the three table hosts presented the synthesis of their table discussion, we naturally ended up with just one common research problem to be investigated using one conceptual framework, which was illustrated in a graph form on one table and in a matrix form on another table. The convergence process happened naturally during the world café, which made the plenary discussion afterwards much easier. Perhaps the very precise question for the café helped; it already asked participants to set their minds in a converging mode.


The lesson I have learned: the knowledge café method is not just a useful way to share experiences and results, it can also be used to converge different views in order to take a common decision.

David Guetta
Choose, One love, Virgin Music