Trevor

Funeral Songs is a project I started in response to having been to a lot of funerals and having seen a lot of death.

The hardest death was my brother's death: Trevor Mudie.

We never played the funeral song Trevor requested. Strangely, a few weeks before he died, he asked Mum if she'd play Moby's Porcelain at his funeral. When he died, Mum couldn't recall what the song was so we played something else (Jane Siberry's Calling All Angels). Later Mum remembered the Moby song.

I started Funeral Songs as a way of honouring Trevor. I know he'd really like this project - he never really 'got' any of my other projects.

Funeral Songs: Dedicated to Trevor Alec Mudie (1980-2001).

Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris

Man Ray. Charles Baudelaire. Henri Langlois. Jean Seberg. Marguerite Duras. Jean Paul Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir.

Some of the most amazing people who ever lived, and they're all interred at Montparnasse Cemetery, which Drew and I visited on 12 January 2007. Maybe I could be buried here too?

Catacombs, Paris

The Lonely Planet guide for Paris categorises the Catacombs in the "Quirky Paris" section. Drew and I headed to the Catacombs after visiting Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise on 11 January. Quirky or not, we had decided that this day was a day of the dead. The catacombs were fascinating. You go down this long narrow spiral stairway into the bowels of Paris. I think it was a couple of km or something. It was below the Metro at least. I got in trouble (in French) for taking a closeup photo of a bunch of skulls with a flash from a security guard who was lurking undetected in the darkness. That scared me more at first. After the shock I just turned on the English-speaking idiot-savant schtick I'd been using as a defence mechanism for not knowing much French. After one shop keeper spat my change back at me I realised I hadn't said pour favour. The irony is that English speaking people don't have rules about saying please all the goddamn time!