Having one of those days when I want to crawl under my bed and never come out, so I thought I’d cheer myself up by browsing the Fringe website and making Edinburgh plans. It’s kind of working :D

So I got pretty much no decent pictures of the Sufjan Stevens/Bryce Dessner/Nico Muhly show at Salle Pleyel on Friday. I wasn’t sure if the staff was going to be strict about it, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, and plus it’s not like I don’t have ridiculous amounts of pictures from all the previous times I saw Sufjan and The National. The show was amazing, of course: I spent so long looking forward to it, I’ve grown to love these songs so much over the past few months, that there wasn’t much of a chance I was going to think otherwise. Like Fran and others have said, it was neat to see how the songs have changed in little ways ever since they were first played live. M got what is hopefully a decent bootleg, but of course nothing compares to an actual professional recording that captures how powerful the trombones sound. Fingers crossed that we get one at some point.

Unfortunately the whole thing was over much too fast – last year’s two and a half hour long shows still have me kind of spoiled, I guess. But we did get an encore (Somewhere Over the Rainbow), so hooray for that. And I keep thinking that the way I felt during the show is the reason why I do anything, really. I listen to music and I go to concerts and I travel and I watch movies and TV series and I read books whenever I can because I know that one experience out of a hundred will manage to make me feel this way: alive, elated, heartbroken in the best possible way, filled with longing and yet somehow also completely satisfied. This feeling is what I mean when I say that art plays a major role in my life. It may sound pretentious or like it’s something far removed from everyday concerns ¹, but this kind of experience is such a central part of what being human is all about for me. I was lucky enough to have quite a few moments of those over the weekend (the show, seeing Starry Night Over the Rhone, the view from the dome of Sacré-Cœur), and I’ll always be grateful for that.

Random tidbit number one: there were people at the show with the Paste Magazine cut out Sufjan paper dolls. It was two parts sweet and one part “This is something I’ll remember the next time I start worrying I might be creepy.”

Random tidbit number two (or, this is where you all start wondering if I’ve finally lost it): I got to Paris very early on Friday, and at about 10am I was on the bus from the airport to Porte Mallot – which, as it turns out, is not far from Salle Pleyel at all. I was near Avenue Victor Hugo when I look out the window and I see Sufjan on a scooter coming in the opposite direction the bus was going. He was wearing a helmet, but with the visor up, and the bus had stopped for a minute, so I got a really good look at his face. M was kind of dozing beside me, and by the time my excited gesturing and cries of “Look, look! That’s Sufjan outside!” had woken him up, we had already driven away.

I do realise how crazy this sounds: Sufjan on a scooter in Paris? Really? And in a city that big, what are the odds he’d be driving by at the same time as our bus? Needless to say, M spent the whole day making fun of me. For the first half hour or so after it happened I was completely sure it was Sufjan, implausibility and all – I did get a good look at him, and it’s not like I don’t know his face really well. But as the day went by, I started wondering if I had imagined the whole thing, of it was just someone who happened to look like him. However! I described his outfit (light grey zip up hoodie, dark pants) to M, and before the concert started, when they all came on stage to set things up before getting changed, he was wearing exactly that. Can’t be a coincidence, right? So there – I did randomly spot Sufjan riding a scooter just as I was arriving in Paris.

Next up: more Paris pictures than you want to see. I’ll try my best not to go overboard.

¹ And it is in a way, but in others, not so much. Also, I know that there are cultural and class factors involved in getting this feeling from some things and not from others, which could be the subject of a whole other post. I won’t go there now, but I wanted to say that I know some people feel this intensely alive watching sports or going on a hike or running or walking into a cathedral or whatever, and that’s all fine by me. I don’t buy into the notion that art is inherently superior to other systems of constructing meaning.