Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Everything cultural that interests me: music, reading, science, arts in general, news, photography…
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.
Write-up of my 5-day trip to the UK. Movies with Aleika, Bombay Dreams in London, an IRC meetup.
The nice thing about having a laptop is that you can fire it up on the airplane and type in peace, without being distracted by IRC, instant messaging, e-mail and stats checking, or simple bloghopping. With iTunes in the background playing Bombay Dreams, my only concern is that the plane will start descending towards Geneva shortly.
My trip to the UK was short, and last-minute. I heard some people from #joiito were going to meet up in London on Sunday, I checked my easyjet flights, called Aleika–
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we will be landing shortly in Geneva. Please return to your seats, make sure your seatbelt is fastened and your seat is in the upright position, and switch off any electronic equipment.”
There goes the laptop, and I now find myself with a post which will be hard to date. Anyway. (Warning: this is a “cheese sandwich” post to some extent, so if you’re bored already, don’t bother reading it.)
Where was I? Yes, last-minute trip. I found a friend to house-and-cat-sit for me, which was nice, and spent the first couple of days at Aleika’s. We did our usual “girls at the movies” thing: get dressed up a bit, leave home late, grab some food which doesn’t come fast enough (well, it took long enough to arrive that I drank my pint of cider almost entirely before the meal, and can now testify that it’s all it takes to make my head spin quite a lot), jump into a cab and run to the theatre (slightly inebriated), only to find that the timings on the internet were incorrect, and we have another half-hour to wait before gleefully drooling all over Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing (OK, I got a bit carried away here, but you get the picture).
I got to spend nearly a whole day alone with Akirno, which was really nice. I didn’t get to see him much on my last visits. He’s grown so much! And he talks so much! (Yes, I know, that’s what I say each time I come back from Birmingham.) He’s a real sweetie. I love him very much.
Unfortunately, I caught a cold (over the top of my first one!) waiting for the bus after Van Helsing, so all my pre-London shopping was done in a rather feverish state. Looking at the bright side of things, it means I didn’t spend as much as I might have, which is a good thing, as my suitcase was already quite full enough (and my bank account empty enough, but that’s another story).
Driving to London went fine. We found a parking space right next to the Apollo Victoria Theatre. (Remember: Sunday matinée shows are a good idea if you’re going to London to see a musical or a play.) Bombay Dreams was really fun, specially as I know most of the songs Rahman re-used for the musical.
Still dressed up (I chose the pink dress), I headed for the #joiito meet-up. Despite this nagging feeling of being somewhat overdressed, and my cold, I had a very nice evening.
As always, though, I had to cope with the frustration of group meet-ups: not enough time to talk with everybody, not enough time to get into interesting conversations with those I talk to. Or maybe I’m just more of a one-to-one person? Anyway, standing invitation for any of you who would want to visit the beautiful town of Lausanne or practice French in the area — just drop me a line, or better (since e-mail is soon to be a dead form of communication, thanks to spam), catch me on IRC.
So, who was there? Well, as I’m nearing the ages of senility, I’m probably forgetting a lot of people, so please bear with me if you’re not mentioned, and let me know if it bothers you too much.
First of all, imajes, my kind host, who was so busy taking me through his iTunes collection on the train back that he missed his home stop. (Can it get worse than that?) Suw prevented me from being the only woman present (I can’t thank you enough for that). Joi was so utterly bored by my presence next to him that he left early to go back to his hotel and sleep — imagine that! (Actually, it seems jetlag also had something to do with it…)
I chatted quite a bit on the way there with imsickofmaps, and on the way back with snowchyld. Hugh managed to mess up my first blogcard somewhat (or whatever those things are called), so I am now the lucky owner of two of them. Gerard aka insert-coin took a nice bunch of photographs and has already put them online. I stole Suw’s camera to take a few photographs, but she’s not home yet, and those I took with my phone are stuck in there until I lay my hands on a Windows PC (thanks, Microsoft).
Apart from bumping my head on a couple of low doorways and leaving my coat there, I brought two things back (not literally) from james’ flat: VoodooPad, which I have not adopted as my official scrap-book application, and a book which made me discover a blog (how often has that happened to you?): Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs, a collection of great weblog posts. I read a few pages, and it looked really neat. It’s on my wishlist now.
I think this post is long enough, for a short trip!
Going to the UK for a few days.
I’m off to the UK for a few days, to see Aleika and Akirno, Bombay Dreams, and go to a #joiito meetup.
Vernissage de l’expo photo de l’Helvète Underground ce soir à Blonay.
Chers amis et chères amies de la région, on n’oublie pas d’aller montrer le bout de son nez printanier au vernissage de l’Helvète, ce soir dès 18h00 à Blonay (oui, c’est bien 18h00, quoi qu’en dise l’affiche).
Five CD’s in my CD rack: Khoobsurat soundtrack, Khakee soundtrack, Killing Me Softly by Roberta Flack, U2’s Unforgettable Fire, and Véronique Sanson comme ils l’imaginent.
This is turning into a bi-weekly feature, though through no intentional design. We’ll see how things evolve during the next weeks.
Here for today:
Five more next week, or the week after!