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 (festival of music), 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 of 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.