due to the europe trip, i missed father's day this year.  but only sort of.  father's day 2009 happened to fall on the same day as the summer solstice (june 21), which, for the rest of the world, is one of the biggest party days on the calendar.  some countries have dance parties around huge bonfires where they burn fake witches.  some repress their pagan urges in favor of religious festivals (ie, St John the Baptist day zzzz).  france does it right.  they have what they call Fete de la Musique (musical festival), during which every concert hall, ampitheater, and street corner in the whole country welcomes musicians of all types (and talent levels) to go crazy.  so at pere's suggestion, fiij and i spent father's day in paris.  it was completely righteous.  we filmed some stuff.  the quality is crap, but it's enough to put you there.  thanks for making it happen, pere.

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we started at 5pm heading south on the metro in search of a tiny church where the choir was to perform two works by Gabriel Fauré - his Requiem and 'Le Cantique de Jean Racine', one of my favorite pieces of choral music of all time.  the church turned out to be farther away and harder to find than we'd thought.  we finally  found it - literally sitting on a roundabout in the middle of an intersection.  we got there for the final bars the Requiem's 'Offertoire', but in plenty of time to hear the entirety of the Cantique.  which, despite what this video suggests, was smashing, and the perfect way to kick off FdlM.

(i wasn't supposed to record in the church, hence the "holding the camera in the lap" angle. my apologies.) from there, we wandered back towards the Bercy train station, and as we passed a handful of street bands warming up, we stumbled upon this little bit of magic:

from that moment on we were pretty sure this was gonna be the greatest night ever. and our next venue did not disappoint. we headed to the church of Notre Dame des Champs (not the big one) on the promise of gospel music. what we found exceeded even our fanciest fancies. it was a french gospel choir, composed entirely of white people (except for the conductor and one black guy they kept around for solos and street cred). they sang only english songs, in english (or something like it), and to be honest, they were pretty bad. but they sang and swayed in their robes and totally sold it. and to again be honest, hearing "Go Down Moses", Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and "What a Wonderful World" sung in franglish by a bunch of earnest white folks in a beautiful parisian church can really only ever be a glorious experience.

from there we headed off toward the latin quarter, home to some of fiij's favorite churches and gyro places. en route we came across a variety of bands of varying degrees of quality, but all of whom contributed to the general feeling of goodnesss and merriment that the city teemed with that night. here are a few, in order of sweetness:

1) a groovy little brass band near Saint Sulpice:

2) a pretty standard rock band with a pretty talented guitarist singing a song from the STC sales tape:

3) a crappy punk band doing a hilariously awful Offspring cover near Saint Germaine:

after a quick stop for a Pita Extra Grecque, we crossed the seine and headed into Notre Dame (the big one), where a pretty radical contemporary organ concert was underway. again, the quality is crappy, but the blown out audio gives you a sense of how bombastic the whole thing was:

yeah, pretty nuts. after that we wandered around the city for a bit, with fiij leading the tour through some of his favorite places. we ended up at La Madeleine, where a concert by a really talented women's choir was underway:

by that time the sun was starting to set (about 1030pm or so), so after discovering a giant church that neither of us knew existed before, we made our way to the Louvre in hopes of seeing the National Orchestra perform under the glass pyramid. it was packed to capacity, so all we could do was watch from above. but it was cool. the real show was going on just off the main square, where a huge crowd had gathered around a tiny little kid who was, you know, just playing his violin:

we saw a few things after that (including a tight little jazz group just outside our hostel, and a raging techno party on the steps of the national treasury), but the violin kid kind of summed up what Fete de la Musique was all about. it wasn't really about the formal venues and organized concerts. it was folks using the pretty lame excuse of it being the longest day of the year to set down their super important lives for a second, to get out among smelly humanity and enjoy one of the few things that pretty much every human being on the planet enjoys in some form or another.  and it was a musical representation of exactly the kind of beautiful, boundary-less, unified and ultimately human ideal that pere has spent the better part of his life working towards.  needless to say a great great day.  happy pere's day, pere.

in 36 hours i'll be in barcelona, kicking of a 15 day whirlwind trip through .  if you wanna follow me and le fiij on our magical european ax-travaganza, here's a couple ways you can do it.

• follow along on the twitter feed. -->
• follow us on google latitude. -->
• please don't call or text, but please send us emails (we've got the blackberry, so use my email addresses, not fiij's)
• if you're real nice, and i can figure how to do it, i might even try and post some blogs via email from the blackberry.  no promises tho.

see you in few.  -d

UPDATE: the wireless data signals out here don´t have GPS capability, so latitude isn´t gonna work. wah.

so i stopped blogging for a while there. then i started again. in getting back into things, i've been tweaking the site a bit -- adding some things, fixing others, just basically trying to make my need for attention more appealing and accessible to you. pretty much all of it is in the right column there -->. here's a quick run down:

• that thing at the top under "i am..." is my twitter feed. which i update way more than my blog. and am only slightly more embarassed about.
• under the 'seeking' heading there is one new tool and one improved tool. the first field allows you to search the blog for anything you want. (thanks to google for indexing my site. and for lunch last week.) the other is a subscription form, where you can sign up to get a funny email with a moose on it every time i post something new. no way that will ever clog up your inbox.
• the next 3 sections are quick blurbs on the music (listening), movies (watching) and books (reading) that i'm currently into. they also get updated way more than the rest of the blog.
• lastly, that little rounded grey rectangle with the white triangle on it in the bottom left hand corner of the screen is the new living the dream media player.  basically whatever music i've posted in the last 10 posts will appear in a playlist that you can then control. click on it. go ahead, click it, it's fun.

that's all. just wanted to make sure my efforts weren't going unappreciated. -d

remember that one time you and your mom were talking on the phone and then out of the blue you asked her to make you a quilted reproduction of one of your favorite paintings even though that's ludicrous and then she went and did it?

'Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow' by Piet Mondrian

oh you don't remember that? interesting. i guess that's probably because your mom is nowhere near as cool as mine is. really luce? really?! unbelievable. seriously. no words. the weenies were right. you are the best. -d

'Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow' by Luce
(click the pic to get a good hi-res look at it)

oh that's right, this is happening. i'm leaving for barcelona next wednesday and i figured i needed to start wrapping up one european chapter before opening another. so just relax, and let me take you back. cause i'm going to. 

[note: the (PIC) links open a full res picture in a new window, and the (VID) links open up a youtube video in new a window.]

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despite the look on my face there, day 2 actually started out alright. granted, all the pharmacies in viana (VID) (even the 24 hour ones) were still inexplicably closed (okay, not inexplicably, it was the fiestas, but COME ON!) so there were no knee braces or ibuprofen to be found. plus my camelback sprung a leak before i even got out of the albergue (VID).  but fortunately it was just a small hole about 1/3 of the way down the bag, so the only repurcussions were running out of water a tiny bit earlier and having a wet back and butt all day (which wasn't altogether unpleasant).  and i still managed to get up and out of the albergue nice and early in time to hit logroño just after sunrise (PIC), which was beautiful.  due to a weak showing from the walking pilgrims, i took the walker's route all the way from outside logroño, all the way through the old city to the vineyards (PIC) that lie between logroño and the next town over called navarrete (PIC).  that was when things really started to go downhill. from the audio journal:

so my knees were killing me, my bike packs were jimmy-rigged to my rack with carabiners and rope, and the only thing more full of holes than my camelback were the directions in my stupid guidebook.  but then i arrived in najera (PIC). sweet sweet najera (PIC).

armed w/ knees braces, ibuprofen, ice cold coca cola and chuches (delicious spanish candy), i was able to thoroughly enjoy the fiestas procession (VID) through the town (turns out the entire region of navarra was in fiestas) before heading off towards beauty and blasphemy (PIC) in a small town called santo domingo de la calzada (VID).

things improved markedly in the stretch after santo domingo de la calzada. the ride was beautiful, my bike had ceased an annoying clicking noise it had adopted the day prior, and i happened upon a spring of the coldest most delicious water that, after filling up my camelback, spread cool refreshing goodness to my back, butt, stomach and soul.  the land was beautiful, surprisingly diverse.  as the miles passed, my surroundings seemed to alternate between arid farmland, lush vineyards and strange deciduous forests that felt completely out of place.  as i approached the Oca Mountains, the expanses of trail between villages got longer and longer, which i'd realized that morning was setting me up for a very long ride:

the last town i hit before heading into my first major mountain pass was called villafranca montes de oca. i stopped and ate some snacks at a playground that sat in the shadow of this really unique church (PIC). it was completely white, with a tall white belltower that from a distance made it look like it belonged in boston or something. as i got closer it turned out it was white stone, the texture of which made it look a lot less colonial, but still beautful.  after spending about 10 minutes snacking on chuches and trying in vain to swat away hoardes of god's most nefarious creation -- the spanish fly -- i hopped on my bike and headed up into the Oca Mountains, with heavy black rainclouds closing in behind.

my newfound invincibility (and the kryptonic flies) stayed with me through the rest of the day. as soon as i hit the pinnacle of the mountain pass, the clouds cleared, providing spotless vistas of the Oca range (VID). as i coasted down the other side towards burgos, I passed the hermetic monastery of san juan de ortega (VID), and countless idyllic pueblos like zalduendo (PIC) with their perfect little churches. unfortunately, by the time i arrived in burgos (PIC), the only albergue in the entire city of nearly 200,000 people was completely full. so i backtracked 3km and shelled out 30 euros for a room at a hostal, where, after 11.5 hours and 135km of riding, i collapsed in the bathtub. granted, a lot of the collapsing had more to do with some standing water on the floor of the bathroom than exhaustion, but i would have gotten there eventually. it had been a pretty long day, in every sense of the word.

after a delicious dinner of tortilla española, huevos fritos, patatas, pan, another ice cold coke, and a random hot dog which i think they threw in there just b/c i'm an american, i found my way back up to my room and put an end to a day well spent.  though if i'd known what the next day held in store for me, i think i would have tried to make that night last as long as i could...