Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Everything cultural that interests me: music, reading, science, arts in general, news, photography…
Je serai à Paris du 3 au 6 janvier.
[en] I'll be in Paris between January 3 and 6.
Voilà ! J’ai une des quatre dernières places dans le TGV pour Paris de lundi soir. J’y resterai jusqu’à jeudi soir, avec un saut au Paris Carnet du 5 janvier.
A bientôt!
Je suis allergique aux acariens. On va faire le ménage.
[en] I'm allergic to acarids. Cleaning up to get rid of the dust. Rather boring and uninteresting post.
Un petit billet sans grand intérêt pour noter que j’ai appris hier avec soulagement que j’étais allergique aux acariens, et pas aux chats (ce qui était une hypothèse possible).
Au menu, donc, nettoyage à fond de l’appart, et prise de mesures concernant la chambre à coucher: changement de draps toutes les semaines chrono, aspi deux fois par semaine, réaménagement pour éviter les nids de poussière.
Ensuite, faudra voir s’il faut faire quelque chose à mon futon pur coton et mes tatamis pure paille de riz pour chasser les bébêtes si elles les habitent.
Légère commotion cérébrale au judo vendredi. Quelques jours de repos s’imposent.
[en] Mild concussion at judo. Working this week hasn't helped. Seeing the doctor tomorrow and taking a few days rest.
Une “correction cérébrale” — voilà ce que j’ai dit à l’une de mes élèves hier, alors qu’elle me demandait si j’avais corrigé les tests de grammaire. Le pire c’est que je ne m’en suis absolument pas rendu compte.
“Zéro virgule zéro virgule zéro– euh… zéro virgule zéro zéro deux” — ça, c’était durant le cours de maths de la période d’avant.
Vendredi à l’entraînement de judo, alors que je me trouvais au sol après avoir effectué sur mon partenaire un magnifique tani-otoshi (technique que j’affectionne particulièrement), le ciel m’est soudainement tombé sur la tête. Autrement dit, un judoka voisin (pas celui avec lequel je pratiquais) m’a chuté lourdement sur le sommet du crâne.
Résultat: un occiput pas très content, et la boîte crânienne un peu malmenée.
Conséquences concrètes: un mal de tête persistant, de la difficulté à me concentrer, la nuque qui fait “bloc”, des absences, de petits trous de mémoire et troubles de la parole. Plus, bien entendu, l’effet “je me sens assommée” d’une légère commotion. Une fois que j’ai donné mes cours de la journée, je suis dans un état relativement moyen pour préparer mes cours, et surtout (à deux semaines de la fin de la période!) faire mes corrections.
La pile de papiers fait maintenant une dizaine de centimètres d’épaisseur, et malgré ma visite chez l’ostéo mardi, mon état ne s’améliore pas. Au contraire, il empire presque — à force de rester active et de courir dans tous les coins.
Les commotions, je commence à bien connaître. Celle-ci n’est pas très forte, mais le fait que j’aie travaillé toute cette semaine, et que je sois également fatiguée et stressée n’aide pas du tout. Quand je conduis, je me rends bien compte que je ne suis pas en état.
Il a fallu qu’on me pousse un peu (“ah non, la semaine prochaine ils ont plein de tests, je peux pas me faire remplacer, peut-être dans dix jours, ou bien en début de période prochaine?”) mais demain, médecin, et arrêt de travail de quelques jours.
Je serai certainement présente au Paris Carnet du 5 janvier.
[en] I'll certainly be present on January 5th in Paris for the weblogger meetup "Paris Carnet".
Chaque mois ou presque, je lis les comptes-rendus (dans un nom composé, l’élément s’accorde si c’est un nom ou un adjectif et si le sens le permet — oups navrée, déformation professionelle, mais c’est le sujet d’orthographe du moment) de Paris Carnet et je regrette de ne pas habiter plus près de la capitale française.
C’est donc (quasi!) décidé, j’irai passer quelques jours à Paris début janvier, histoire de montrer le bout de mes oreilles au Paris Carnet du 5 janvier. Il paraît même que Guillermito sera là — raison de plus!
Et vous, y serez-vous? On a le temps, mais il faudra aussi que j’organise mon hébergement. Si vous avez un lit propre et non-fumeur (de préférence) à me proposer, faites signe!
(En passant, j’ai créé un canal Paris Carnet sur TopicExchange.com. Il suffit d’envoyer un trackback à cet adresse lorsque vous écrivez un billet concernant Paris Carnet pour qu’il apparaisse sur la page.)
Je serai à Nyon mardi, mercredi, jeudi et dimanche. Faites signe si vous avez envie qu’on s’y retrouve!
[en] I'll be at Paléo Festival (Nyon) on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Let me know if you would like to meet up there!
Juste un mot pour dire que je serai au Paléo mardi, mercredi, jeudi, et dimanche. Je ne sais pas trop dans quelle mesure je serai joignable par sms les premiers jours vu que je loge au camping. Si jamais vous y allez et que ça vous dit qu’on s’y voie, faites-moi signe déjà maintenant!
BlogTalk resources: live stream, topic exchange, wiki page… stay connected, whether you are lucky enough to be in Vienna or not.
If you aren’t lucky enough to be attending the BlogTalk conference today and tomorrow, you can still follow the fun with the live stream from the conference.
Other than that, two topics to keep an eye on over at Topic Exchange:
Topic Exchange allows to comfortably solve the problem “do I trackback other related posts, even if I haven’t linked to them directly?” — use Topic Exchange.
If you’re at the conference and/or staying at Hotel Atlas, make use of Rendez-Vous (Rendez-Vous allowed me to “bump” into a fellow blogtalker last night), the BlogTalk wiki page and #blogtalk on freenode. Also — no fear of stating the obvious — come up for a chat, I love meeting others in the flesh!
A few random facts about the last two days in Vienna.
This will be short and incomplete because I am just about to go straight asleep in front of the screen. I spent the last two days roaming around with Horst, Suw and Philipp.
A first uneventful day in Vienna. Ethernet at the Hotel Atlas, too much walking, an expensive orange juice and a nice girl on the train.
So here I am, in Hotel Atlas, with free ethernet, a non-feather pillow, a bathtub, and already a few more books to add to my collection.
BlogTalk will start on Monday, so I have the week-end before me to do some exploring. I’m open to suggestions, still!
My first day here has been pretty uneventful (barring “rain” from the “events” category). I’ll just make three notes.
Firstly, if you go to have breakfast at Café Westend, just opposite the station, and the waiter asks you if you would like some orange juice, be prepared to pay as much for it as for the whole breakfast (approx. 5’€, perfectly reasonable for the breakfast, perfectly overpriced for the orange juice — even though it is freshly pressed). I made the mistake of thinking it was included, and was nastily shocked when I got the bill.
Second, I tend to walk way beyond my limits of tiredness. I just don’t stop. It’s so annoying. All the more now, as I actually catch myself doing it, but still can’t stop. I really have to find a way to avoid walking myself to death this week-end.
Third and last, I made a friend on the train to Zürich — fate had me sit right opposite Andrea, who lives in Geneva and was also making her way to Vienna. We’re meeting again tonight, with her (very nice and local-now-expat’) boyfriend.
I’ll be in Vienna from 1st-6th of July for BlogTalk 2.0, and I am looking for people to meet before the conference and eventually someone to share a hotel room with. Let me know if you’ll be there!
I’ll be going to Vienna early July for BlogTalk 2.0, a series of conferences on weblogs. I’m planning to go there a few days before, so I’ll be in Vienna from July 1st or 2nd to July 6th evening. Registration for the conference is open until June 21st if you want the cheaper, before-the-conference prices. Otherwise you can always register at the conference.
Is anybody else (apart from Suw) going to be in Vienna before the conference? I could also be interested in sharing a (cheapish) hotel room with somebody. Please leave a message in the comments or update BlogTalkVienna on Joiwiki if you’re going to be there!
A pretty long review of the fantastic show Chris de Burgh gave last night in Lausanne.
Warning: long, rambling, and clumsily written review ahead. I obviously still have progress to make in review writing! Thanks for bearing with me.
Chris de Burgh gave us a delightful solo show in Lausanne last night, armed with only his guitar, his piano and his songs (ok, with a very small dose of recorded choirs and stuff for a couple of songs).
The show started with The Road to Freedom, title song from his latest album, and continued for two and a half hours, including songs from a variety of albums. I was happy to hear It’s Such a Long Way Home, from the album Crusader, pretty early on in the show. Crusader is one of the first Chris de Burgh albums I actually owned, way back in the time of vinyl, and it’s an album I appreciate a lot.
Chris de Burgh introduced many of the songs he sang by giving the audience some background on them, often half in French and half in English. (We also got updates on the score for the ongoing Russia-Portual football match, which I found pretty cool — even if I don’t care about football at all.) Last Night (a personal favorite), a song about the damages of war, for the young soldiers who come back, and those who remain when they don’t, was an occasion to comment on actuality: Maybe Mr. Bush will think about this next time he wants to go to war.
Right on the theme of war and its ills, Chris de Burgh later sang Borderline followed by Say Goodbye to It All — something I’d really been waiting for, as the second was written as a sequel to the first one.
Speaking of sequels, Lady in Red (a song you probably know even if you’ve never heard about Chris de Burgh, and that you might also understandably be sick of hearing too much on the radio) has a sequel in the latest album: Five Past Dreams. Before singing it, he told us about this strange fact: women spend a lot of time making themselves beautiful before going out, but men seem incapable of remembering what they were wearing. Lady in Red is about this man who is a party, and is looking at this beautiful woman in the crowd… and suddenly realises that it’s the woman he came with…
After poking a bit of fun at Britney and playback singers, Chris de Burgh put on a headset mike and actually got off stage with his guitar to walk through the public and shake hands while he sang a medley. Pretty impressive, if you ask me!
One great present of this evening for me was hearing the song Sailor again. Sailor is a song from the album Eastern Wind, which, along with The Getaway and Man on the Line, made me discover Chris de Burgh nearly twenty years ago. I remember the time when I listened to this song over and over again — it was one of those spine-prickling songs for me. And when Chris de Burgh started singing it tonight, I realised that I had totally forgotten it existed. I was incapable of naming it until he reached the chorus — something which hardly ever happens to me, as I have a pretty spooky memory for names.
I won’t go through all the songs which were sung. Imagine how many songs can be sung in two and a half hours, even with a fair amount of chatting en between! However, I’d like to mention one that I found particularly moving: Songbird, written after Chris de Burgh heard Eva Cassidy singing on the radio. Unknown in her lifetime, she died of cancer at the age of thirty-three, and it is said she had one of the most wonderful singing voices ever heard.
To sum it up, this show was a real treat. Chris de Burgh was the first artist I ever got to see live, almost twenty years ago, and I have trouble understanding how I let all those years pass without seeing him again. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for his next tour.
My friend Rachel, who accompanied me, knew only two Chris de Burgh songs (the inevitable Lady in Red and High on Emotion, but of course she had no idea who sang those songs), but she had a really great time too. I think that like me, she was moved by how very human and close to the public Chris de Burgh is. It seems to me (and the notes you can read in the Ask Chris section on his official website seems to confirm this) that he really has a sincere belief in his work — thirty years after his first album.
As I was saying to Steph a few hours ago: I like artists that look like human beings.
If you have a chance to see Chris de Burgh live, do so — particularly if all you know of him is Lady in Red!
For the curious, here is a list of the songs I didn’t mention here but that I remember from the show:
Update 24.06.04: I’ve been thinking quite a lot these last days about why I like this singer so much, and why I’ve stuck with him for the last 20 years. Here is something he says about feeling what he sings that I really like:
When I sing, I like to convey a total and absolute honest belief in what I am singing. It’s very important for me to convey an emotion, and unless you feel that emotion, you can’t convey it. It’s my belief. So when I sing, I wear the song like a coat, I try to convey everything that I put into it initially. All the ideas, all the feelings, all the emotions.
Chris de Burgh
If you’ve listened to his songs a bit, I think you’ll agree with me that this is a man who seems to know what it is to love.