Solidays

On Sunday, I went to the Solidays concert festival at the Hippodrome de Longchamp, a huge horseracing stadium in the Bois de Boulogne park just outside Paris. It was a terrific event with five stages and 60 different concerts over the course of weekend.
Here's the view from the south end, from the biggest stage (not pictured).



My favorite, and the reason I decided to go, was Maceo Parker, a saxophonist who also plays the flute and sings with his jazz/funk band. The only bad part was that the sound amplification kind of mushed up the music. The audience was better than I expected at appreciating him, considering that most of the acts there were pop, rock or techno. Here's Maceo Parker and his band:

Joy and Sadness

Last night, the French watched their venerable Zizou blow his top and get kicked out of the game and then saw the World Cup slip through their fingers into the hands of the Italian team. No parade, no riots in the street. Last night, people went home from the stadium by my apartment quietly, although I heard some people shooting off their fireworks anyway.
The principal topic of conversation this morning is about the Zidane-Materazzi incident. This Marco Materazzi character, who is nicknamed "Matrix," has quite a record of incredibly violent plays. Perhaps Zidane was just getting back at him for all of the nasty moves he's pulled on the field. Materazzi is also known for statements making fun of Marc Zoro, a player born in the Ivory Coast, who left the field at a game in Italy after fans chanted racial slurs and ape noises at him. Many people are guessing that it was a racial slur against Zidane, whose parents are Algerian immigrants, that finally caused him to lose his temper. He cheered up for lunch with Chirac, fortunately. No one seems to be talking about Frenchwoman Amelie Mauresmo winning Wimbledon!

La finale

Ah, la finale. Maggie and Tom left Paris this morning, bound for Bayeaux and the beaches of Normandy. It was really great having them here, I had a ton of fun and sometimes I can't believe that, despite long passages of time and distance, our friendship holds true. If you want to look at some of the pictures they took while in Paris, I've uploaded a couple batches onto Flickr, first my site and then the site of my dad. If you look at the sets you will see the pictures in the order that they were taken, rather than the inverse order, the way are displayed on the Flickr Home of each account. Both of those accounts are maxed out as far as uploads, so you'll have to wait for Maggie and Tom to get back to the US to get a link to the rest of the pictures they want to share on the server they use.

So, as for the other finale, Paris is really gearing up for Sunday's match. I hope they win! In a spooky coincidence, I accidentally stained my recently synthesized polymer with blue marker ink that refuses to come out. Allez Les Bleus!

I am thinking of going to part of a 3-day concert weekend that is part of a festival to benefit the fight against AIDS: Solidays. There are 60 different concerts over the span of the weekend, and people even have the option to camp out there the whole time. The weather is perfect right now, although it might rain a bit this weekend.