Luis in Paris

LuisInParis is Moving!

2010-07-01T09:07:00.000+02:00

We're moving!

Well, Luis will stay where he is, and LuisInParis will stay where it is, too. I'm keeping all of my archives from previous years in the same place for future use and so that you can still find any posts that you like through search engines. Nevertheless, no new blog posts will be published here.

What is new is LMGMblog. As my Paris fieldwork period has come to an end, I've decided to move away from the post-a-day format (which I haven't really be sticking to recently, anyway) and split up my writing work. LMGMblog will include:

“party reviews,” that is, accounts of techno/house/etc. events as I did frequently on my old blog.
brief essays on concepts and issues I’m working through for my own intellectual work, with the hope that you all can give me the sort of support and critique that I need to write better and smarter
readings/reviews of books and articles that I encounter as I work on my dissertation

There will NOT be any more of my recipes here, but that’s because I’m starting a totally new food blog called Macerating in Public, where I'll be posting photo-blogged recipes, restaurant/shop reviews, and other foodie geekery. Check it out! There’ll be updates soon.

Last Update on Old Blog

2010-05-01T06:08:00.002+02:00

Hi, hi. OK, so this will be the last time that I post a reminder on this blog about new posts on my new blog. We've got a couple of things posted recently: 1. a review/summary of Nigel Thrift's essay, "But Malice Aforethought," which is on urban studies, affect, and light-touch intimacy. 2. a new podcast, which I have dubbed the "Dancypants Podcast" for no particularly good reason.

Luis is not a bedroom DJ…

2010-04-23T19:35:00.002+02:00

…but more of a "living room" DJ. In any case, I recently posted my first recorded DJ Mix/Podcast on Soundcloud, which you can also find embedded in my most recent post to my new blog.

New Orleans by Train, the Adventures Thereupon

2010-04-08T10:42:00.000+02:00

Hi again. As with the last post, I'm posting a link here to my newest post on my new blog, LMGMblog, just in case you haven't updated your RSS reader / bookmarks. This new post is on my trip to New Orleans for a conference, and my adventures during the 19-hour trek by train. You might be surprised at how much happened.

San Fran Field Trip: Intimacy, Strangers, and Translocality

2010-04-06T21:15:00.003+02:00

Hullo again, everyone. Since I know that many of you have RSS subscriptions to this blog—and perhaps you haven't updated your RSS reader with my new blog—I'm posting a link here to my most recent post on LMGMblog. I'll be doing this for the next few posts across my blogs.

So this post, entitled "San Fran Field Trip: Intimacy Strangers and Translocality," is a brief reflection on a trip I took to the Berkeley and San Francisco back in mid-March. What was interesting about this trip was that I posted a Facebook status update a few days before my departure, asking if anybody knew what was going on in the Bay Area. Within the space of a couple of days, I had a daily lineup of techno/house events in San Fran, along with a network of friends-of-friends that were offering to act as guides. By the end of that weekend, I had a whole new network of contacts and friends in the San Francisco techno scene. The notion of a trans-local music scene/network is a concept that is central to both my doctoral and my post-doctoral projects; I'm trying to argue that the practices, values, and people in "minimal techno" or "house" or whatever circulate between locations in a way that allows a partygoers to arrive in new locations and insert themselves into the scene with minimal friction. I can already argue this point by describing the flow of musical recordings (vinyl, mp3s, podcasts), people (DJs, techno-tourists, friendship networks), and writing (online magazines, travel guides, forums); but this anecdote provides a great example of how this ease of mobility also comes from the previous travel and trans-local contacts of members of your friendship network. More interestingly, the request for hospitality by a mutual friend (i.e., the person who introduces you to new contacts at your destination) activates a bundle of ethical responsibilities that make the encounter especially intimate.

OK, go read the rest of the post!

Halloween in Chicago: Partytime!

2009-10-31T08:15:00.000+01:00

Again, I’m writing this many, many days after the fact, but I needed to pay tribute to some of the costumes worn at tonight’s Halloween party (a private affair organized members of the same Chicago crew that I used to hang out with before leaving for France).

I began the evening with my parents (who were visiting me) for dinner. We went to Ras Dashen and completely stuffed ourselves Ethiopian food. I knew I was going to be dancing later that night and I should’ve known better than to stuff myself full of food, but I just couldn’t help it, it was so good. Their kifto (raw ground beef marinated with spices and clarified butter) is to die for.

I drove my parents to the hotel, ran back to my place to change into my costume, and then bolted out the door. I got to the party—at the same warehouse loft where the afterparty for Souvenir was—just in time to witness everyone’s costumes (before everyone got sweaty):

One friend started as Marie Antoinette—wig and all—and changed costumes at about 5 a.m. to become a “raver kitten”
A couple came as Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein, with an amazing streaked wig for the Bride and a hand-made papier-mâché brow/forehead for Frankenstein. And no small amount of makeup, I might add.
One of my friends shows up at first looking like a space satellite with planets hanging off of her. Later, she changes into a cupid costume. As the night goes on, she goes through several more costume-changes and finishes with a t-shirt that says, “364 days till Halloween.”
The same friend’s neighbor needed a costume at the last minute and she helped him by dressing him in a bunch of her black lingerie and making him look like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture Show.

What did I go as? I went as a candy-raver. It was admittedly a last-minute cop-out costume, since I only needed to fish out an old pair of phat pants and some old wooden bead necklaces and brightly-beaded bracelets, but the costume went over pretty well. There was a marked generational gap in the reactions to my outfit. People about my age or older saw my costume and immediately said, “Candyraver!” and then slid into nostalgic conversation about the good ol’ days. Younger folks mostly had to ask what my costume was at first, and then recognized the label “candyraver” and would make a few bemused comments about how crazy everyone was back then (but without saying that they had been part of the 90s rave scene).

Souvenir 03: The Welcome Home (with Seuil)

2009-09-05T07:07:00.001+02:00

OK, so I'm writing this more than two months after the event itself, but I just had to document one thread of events from the party that I thought was really interesting:

At the party itself, sometime around 2 or 3 a.m., a girl dancing near me approaches and asks, “Hey, are you Luis?” When I say yes, she seems really thrilled and says, “It’s so good to finally meet you! I’m really good friends with O [a friend from France that lives in Chicago now and was co-organizing tonight’s event] and I’ve heard so much about you. I’m Lola.” She’s originally from Poland and I just returned from a year in France and Germany, so we talk a bit about the differences between North America and Europe and the odd situation one can develop of feeling at home in one place while longing for another place. We cross paths occasionally throughout the rest of the party and check in with each other, saying things like “How’re you feeling?” and lightly grasping each other’s shoulders.

The afterparty at a friend’s warehouse loft starts at about 7 a.m. and runs until some ungodly hour that evening (9 p.m., I think). I have a great time and hang out with friends, but eventually I tire and need to get home. I’m still marginally jet-lagged from my return from France, and I’ve spent all week unpacking things and running errands. It’s nearly 2 p.m., I haven’t slept all night/morning, and I was beginning to run out of energy. I make the rounds of the room, saying goodbye to everyone.

As I’m saying goodbye to O., she sees Lola nearby and asks us both, “Do you know each other?”

Lola says, “Of course! We’re best friends.”

Her arm comes up around my shoulder, and my arm winds around her waist. While still facing O., as if we were performing for her, we turn to each other, press our torsos into a half-hug, and reach out with our other arms to rub each others shoulders affectionately. I turn to give her a peck on the check and she turns her head toward me and we end up exchanging a brief peck on the lips.

We had just met for the first time in our lives a few hours ago, and we had hardly said anything to each other after our brief conversation at the party. Nonetheless, something about our encounter made is possible for Lola to claim that we were “best friends,” for me to agree and engage smoothly with her in these gestures of intimacy. It was casual and undramatic, as if we were making observations about the weather rather than claiming a deep, 12-hour-old friendship.

O. smiles with an expression that could be indulgent or bemused or merely pleased, and she says, “Of course.”

(By the way, Seuil’s set, both at the party and the afterparty, kicked major ass.)

On the importance of knickers

2009-09-02T02:29:00.000+02:00

A piece of advice on packing and unpacking clothes: do it in your underwear.

Why, do you ask? Because, before sticking yet another 10-year-old shirt or over-worn pair of pants into a box or back on the hanger, you can slip it on and remind yourself why you rarely ever wear it. If the item only barely fits you, toss it aside and donate it to charity. I managed to clear nearly one quarter of my shirts and pants, which is quite the accomplishment for me. Yay, closet space!

Confit de Canard in Chicago

2009-09-01T02:19:00.001+02:00

Today, I spent most of the day unpacking things with my friends LEO and Peeto. Well, it was mostly LEO who helped, since her workdays were a bit more flexible. Peeto, showed up after work and accompanied us on a trip to Target. Nonetheless, I was pretty impressed with how effective we were today. We got the remaining boxes out of the storage space, unpacked a few more book boxes, and made a run to Target for a few household items that I needed (especially cleaning products and the like).

For dinner, we cracked open a bottle of French wine that I had apparently had the forethought to squirrel away in my storage space before leaving Chicago, and I made the confit de canard that I had brought from France. First, I took the duck thighs out of the can and fried them in a skillet, using just the fat that clung to the meat. Once the meat was heated through and the outside had started to brown and stick to the pan, I removed the meat and threw in some roughly sliced potatoes. Then, I dumped in the remaining fat from the can of confit and let it simmer uncovered until all the liquid had either evaporated or been absorbed by the potatoes. So, in essence, it was a meal made entirely around duck fat.

In my defense, I did make some salad as an appetizer.

Die Unheimliche Heimfahrt

2009-08-31T23:00:00.000+02:00

So, the title of this post translates to “The uncanny return home”, but the wordplay only works in German, where both expressions are constructed around the word heim [home]. Anyway, let me explain what made this so uncanny.

After a reasonably uneventful flight back to Chicago, I got off the plane and waited for what felt like an hour before finally going through immigration and customs. In a fit of honesty, I declared that I was carrying wine, confit de canard (duck cooked and preserved in its own fat), and dry sausage. This meant that my luggage got opened up and taken apart by the Department of Agriculture people, who TOOK MY SAUSAGE!!!11! The wine and the duck were OK, apparently, but I wasn’t allowed to bring in the sausage. Well, I learned my lesson: next time, don’t declare anything. I have to go back to France for a few days in late September, so maybe I’ll bring back some raw-milk cheese, too, just to be a badass.

So two friends were waiting for me at the airport (bless their adorable souls), and after making a valiant attempt to say hi to another friend that was leaving for Britain the same day (and running into another set of people), we finally made it to the parking lot and headed out. We drove back to my old apartment—which is still my current apartment. Rather than give up my lease and put all of my furniture and such in storage like I did the last time I went to France—which was super stressful and rather expensive—I decided to put my apartment up for sublease and offer to sublet it furnished for no extra charge. I still put my clothes and books and valuables into a small storage space, but the furniture, kitchen stuff, linens, and hardware stayed. At the last minute before leaving for Europe about 14 months ago, I finally found a lovely Scottish lad that was willing to take my apartment for the full year. He was just moving into town and had nothing to his name but a backpack full of clothes, so the arrangement worked out perfectly.

Now, a bit more than a year later, I was heading back to my apartment, hoping to find my apartment in the same state that I had left it. What I found was far more than I had expected: everything was almost exactly where I had left it 14 months ago. The same bottles of soy sauce and oil that I had left in the pantry were still there, in the same places, the bottoms of the bottles beginning to fuse with the shelves. The bottle of minced ginger in the refrigerator was still there, along with the few jars of Peruvian hot pepper pastes I had left behind. The bags of rice were exactly the same ones I had been using, still half-empty. There was one lonely head of garlic, now completely dessicated.

There were only a few traces of the previous tenant to be found in the house. The bathroom mat—the same one I had left a year ago—had gone from white to mottled grey. The kitchen utensils that stood in a container next to the stove were all sticky with the residue of vaporized oil from a year’s worth of cooking…although I have no idea what he was cooking, considering the same dry goods were in the same places in my pantry. There was a half-empty leather wallet, forgotten on an empty bookshelf, filled with various membership cards and photos of him and his girlfriend, whose long black hairs were still lurking around the apartment. The kitchen’s leaky faucet had clearly sprung a leak one day, as the cabinet under the kitchen sink had taken some water damage and collapsed downward.

For the rest of the day, as we made trips to the storage unit to retrieve boxes and unpack them, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the apartment had remained empty and abandoned for the last 14 months. The most disturbing place for me was the kitchen, where traces of emptiness and activity were layered on top of each other. I obsessively re-washed all of the dishes in my cupboards and tried to scrub the oily residue off of all of my utensils, while trying not to look too long into my time-capsule pantry.

How I Spent My Summer

2009-08-31T08:50:00.004+02:00

Well, hello there, stranger! It sure has been a while, hasn’t it? I promise, I have a good excuse for being absent for so long. As you might recall from the spate of tardy posts I made in late May / early June, I had The Never-Ending Stream of Houseguests, which continued right through June (with a weekend jaunt to Berlin, thank you very much). My parents also came into town for two weeks in June to celebrate my birthday, which included dinner at Taillvent! So delicious, and only for the price of one month’s rent! A bargain, really.

Anyway, we had a great time, and even managed to get down to Nantes for a couple of days to visit some friends of the family, where we had some excellent food and wine (of course). After that, I spent about two weeks at the end of June doing an intense set of interviews, which turned into hours and hours and hours of transcription work. I easily spent 8 hours transcribing one hour of interviewing. It didn’t help that I let my interviewees choose the location of the interview and it was summer, which meant that everyone wanted to meet on the patio of a café somewhere, usually facing a noisy street. After the first badly-recorded interview, I switched from my iPod/Griffin iTalk setup to a new Olympus digital Dictaphone, which has served me magnificently ever since.

So I spent 12-14 hours a day working on transcriptions, during some of the hottest days of the summer (35ºC/95ºF), in my tiny attic apartment, with skylight windows and no air-conditioning. I think I lost a few pounds a day just from sweat. I got a break when I went south to visit a friend near Rocamadour, in the Lot region of France (south-west). I would work on transcriptions during the day, and then head out on hikes in the neighboring valleys and fields before dinner. It helped that the days were a bit cooler there and that my friend’s place was an old sheep’s pen, built out of stone and half-embedded into the hillside for natural air-conditioning. Oh, and the food was delicious. Rocamadour is the region that produces Rocamadour cheese, which are these little discs of goat cheese that are just on the border between crumbly and creamy. The south-west in general is the land of everything duck, so there was lots of foie gras and confit de canard (duck cooked in its own fat). And in addition to all of that, it was the tail-end of strawberry season, and the mara des bois type of strawberries were available, which is a variety that resembles Ontario wild strawberries in their sweetness and intensity of flavor. All in all, good times.

I was only in Lot for a few days, then I came back to Paris and kept working away at my transcriptions. For the last two weeks of July, I rented out a room in a flat in Berlin for super-cheap and spent two weeks saying goodbye to my favorite techno paradise. I also treated the trip as a writing retreat, and I have to say that I’m impressed with my self-discipline. I would work on my chapter from 9 or 10am until 5pm, then I’d save everything, close my computer, and head off to meet friends, go for walks, etc. Saturdays and Sundays I did no work and concentrated on just partying hard—to do justice to the Berlin scene.

I came back to Paris at the beginning of August and tried to keep up the same work schedule I had developed in Berlin. Since it was still excruciatingly hot and I had no air-conditioning, I adjusted my schedule a bit. I would get up early and work until noon, then bike over to the Bois de Vincennes and lay out in the sun until the late afternoon, then head back to my apartment and do a bit more work. Sometimes, when I was in a section of my chapter that required less citation and more argumentation, I would bring a notebook with me and just write by hand, later editing and inserting it into the chapter.

By mid-July, I finished a chapter, which was pretty much perfect timing. I sent out the chapter to my committee, partied like a fool over the weekend, and then started planning my return to Chicago. Some things were really simple, like doing a thoroughgoing purge of my wardrobe, cleaning the apartment, and sending some of my books off by mail. Other things were complicated, like arranging the closure of my French bank account when I still needed it to receive my safety deposit from my landlord here.

My friends here gave me a great farewell, including a surprise party at a friend’s place that came with this amazing photo-montage of all of us together made by one of the crew that is a professional graphic designer. I also organized a dinner during my last week here as well as a night out at the clubs that I dubbed “Luis se déchire avant de partir” (Luis gets tore up before leaving). Despite all of my preparations, the final few days were a bit hectic, but I was able to spend my last night in Paris having a pleasant dinner and a bottle of wine with some of my friends. Yay, Paris! As you can imagine, I’m really sad about leaving Paris, even if I’m also thrilled to see my Chicago friends again. Thankfully, the pain was alleviated a bit by the knowledge that I was coming back for a few days later in September. Paris, I don’t know how to quit you.

So you might wonder what I’m going to do with a blog called Luis in Paris, now that I’m no longer in Paris (well, I’m writing this from the airport in Paris, but you see what I mean). I’ve been wondering, too. Much like while I was in Berlin, I’m hoping to keep posting about my nighttime adventures and so on while I’m in Chicago, although the frequency of my party notes will vary according to my teaching workload. Also, once in awhile, I’ll post little anecdotes or short observational essays about France and Paris; little fragments that never made it into my day-to-day postings in Paris.

For example, take these pictures:

These are the little paper bags that most grocers at Paris’s open-air markets and corner shops use to sell you tomatoes, mushrooms, bananas, and pretty much anything that fares better in paper bags than plastic. I’m kinda fascinated by the images that are printed on them. In one, you have this rather simple collection of fruits, vegetables and flowers. On another, you have this basket character with an insane grin on his face, stuffed full of the same groceries. On another, you have a mixture of fruits with a palm tree looming in the background. What’s interesting is that all of these conspicuously present at least one “exotic” fruit—that is, a product that isn’t grown naturally in France. In the first image, the pineapple dominates the image from the center; in the second, the half-kiwi is one of only two items that is not in the basket; in the third, you have both the banana and the pineapple, not to mention the palm tree. Considering that most Parisians (at least the middle-class and bohemiain-bourgeois folks I know) tend to place a lot of value on products in season and grown locally, it’s an odd contrast that the bag designs used by the grocers of Paris features exotic fruit prominently. Anyway, I’m going to miss these bags, which I would re-use to store my garlic, steam-peel peppers, and preserve cut vegetables.

Stay tuned for upcoming stories of Luis’s return to Chicago!

Peruvian Food (and Richie Hawtin, Magda, Gaiser, Barem)

2009-05-31T00:34:00.000+02:00

OK, so this is the second time in two weeks that I’m guiltily playing catch-up. As always, I have an excuse. This time, it was a series of things: first, I spent nearly two days just writing up the previous post, where I summarized 3 weeks of activity; second, I managed to give myself some sort of food poisoning from chicken broth that had spent too much time out of the fridge on a rather hot day; third, I spent most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday preparing for the second French installment of my Peruvian food orgy party.

So that was the last few days, and here’s what went down Sunday night:

Peruvian Food Orgy, Paris v. 2.0

I had been very, very disciplined in getting as much of the cooking done as possible the previous day, so the only things left for me today were the dishes that had to be made fresh the day of the meal. I had realized a while ago that arroz chaufa (the Peruvian version of Cantonese fried rice) always tastes better the next day anyway, so I had prepared it yesterday. The preparation of this dish is probably what takes most of my time when I usually throw this party, so my evening was much easier when all I had to do was slide in the rice in a warm oven for a little while.

Anyway, I had taken care of everything but the fried yucca (cassava, manioc) by the time the first guests arrived. Amusingly, all of my friends that I knew from the University of Chicago (many of them Americans, but some also French) arrived on time at 20h00 or a little while afterwards. My techno-related friends started arriving at 21h30 and kept arriving until about 23h00. Standard clubber timing!

Richie Hawtin, Magda, Gaiser, and Barem @ We Love Sonique @ La Grande Halle de la Villette

At about midnight, guests started leaving my place. The original plan was for all of us to head over to La Villette as a group, but a bunch of them got impatient and couldn’t wait until I was done putting away the leftovers and doing some preliminary cleaning. Thankfully, about six of my friends hung back and waited for me.

We made it to the party without incident, catching one of the last trains. There was apparently a Johnny Hallyday concert just finishing up, so there were some odd moments on the train as young clubbers were packed in with aging (mostly working class) baby-boomers and their progeny.

When we got to the Parc de la Villette, I split from the group for a moment to get some cash while the rest of them got in line. As I was heading over to the Halle (which is a massive 19th-century glass-and-steel industrial-era building), I noticed a pair of young-ish girls laughing and making their way towards the lineup. One of them stopped to fix her shoes—which is a difficult task when you’re wearing stilettos and a mini-skirt—when I passed them by. A second later, I heard her voice in my ear:

“Hey.”

“Um, hey.”

“Yeah, uh, it was those earrings of yours that drew my attention.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

“How’s it going?”

“Uh, great, thanks.”

I was more than a bit confused at this point, since it is almost a hard-and-fast rule in France that women never make the first move. Since I doubted that she was scorchingly hot for me, I was wondering if she was after something or just being exceptionally, almost inappropriately gregarious.

“So, are you sober tonight?”

Oh, I see where this is going.

“Yeah, I’m sober, and I don’t really have any connections for anything, either.”

“Oh.”

At that moment, my phone rang and the woman was relieved of the task of extracting herself gracefully from the conversation. I would see her and her friend a few minutes later, having jumped into line next to two men that seemed to be holding their attention.

The phone call was from one of my friends, trying to explain to me where they were standing. After a few moments of confusion, I discovered them standing right at the point where the line passed behind a barricade. One of the girls in our group had apparently had the balls to cut into the line, and then the rest of them had just “merged” behind her. I wasn’t particularly proud of the stunt, but as I glanced back at a lineup that stretched nearly to the end of a building that is easily three blocks long, I decided I could live with it. One other guy from our group, however, was pretty uncomfortable with it, and the whole thing was complicated by the fact that he had seen some other friends of his further back in the line. As we passed behind the barricade, this friend hovered fretfully on the other side of the barrier, unwilling to jump in the line but also reluctant to leave us for the back of the line. I don’t know if it was the length of the line or the fact that everyone in front and behind us was letting people cut into the line, but he eventually relented and hopped over the post. Ironically, we got in before some of the people that left the party before us.

In addition to the massive amounts of line-jumping, there was a rather unpleasant trend of pushing, which just seemed to get worse as we got closer to the door. An interesting effect of these sorts of crowded situations is that, if you turn around to yell at the person pushing you from behind, you always find that they’re being pushed, too. It’s like the pushing isn’t coming from anyone in particular, but just building up as a side-effect of having so many bodies pressed into a tight space.

The pushing and the tight spaces seemed to push a young guy near me over the edge, as he started shoving around himself indiscriminately and violently, cursing up a storm and seeming to be looking for a fight with anybody that talked back him. He eventually cooled down, (not) coincidentally at the precise moment when some security guards arrived to see what the fuss was about.

0h00-1h30: Barem

We finally got in, checked our stuff, and headed toward the main room just as Barem finished his set, so alas I have nothing much to say about his set.

1h30-2h30: Gaiser live

Gaiser put in a good, solid set, although it was nothing revelatory. It had a certain punchy sound that I associate with the M_nus record label (the one that all of the artists tonight are on), with a combination of very dry bass beats, short bleepy synth patterns in the middle registers, and very sparse use of sweeps and washes.

We gathered on one of the raised balconies on the side of the hall to get some drinks and gather together as the rest of the crew arrived. Once we were all assembled, we headed down to the main floor to claim some space on the dancefloor. The crowd was already numerous and densely packed, so our rather large group got squeezed and separated, and we quickly lost each other. I was separated from the main group with another two people, and we spent a good 15 minutes trying to find the rest of our clan in a crowd of easily 2 000 people. We eventually did all find each other, near the back of the main room.

After finding everyone, several people suggested going out for a smoke, and I followed them to get some fresh air (I know, the irony). They were allowing people to leave the building to smoke on the side opposite the entrance, but you needed to have a bracelet to get back inside, which they only gave you right on the way out. If you hadn’t noticed the people giving out bracelets and left without one, you were stuck outside. One of my friends managed to do that, but thankfully we were able to get him back in by accompanying him to the door and attesting that he was with us.

2h30-4h30: Richie Hawtin

Richie Hawtin had just started his set as we were heading back into the building, and an excellent set it was. The sound was streamlined and focused, with a texture that was generally robust but never too complicated. In other words, it was minimalistic in its structure, but not in its scale. He still had his moments of experimental oddness, but they were rather few. In fact, one of my friends complained that the whole set lacked an overarching contour or structure, which I think I agree with. There wasn’t the sort of consistent departure-and-return form that he used to such great effect when I saw him at Nouveau Casino back in the Fall of 2006. In addition to the great musical set, the people taking care of visuals put on an amazing set of projections to go with his set ; they mostly involved simple geometrical forms in white on a black background, moving and rotating in various configurations. As the set went on, the visuals introduced color and representative figures; there was a real emphasis on arcs, circles, eyes (especially the iris), and spheres.

At around 3h00, two other friends arrived, who were not usually into the techno scene but had been at the earlier dinner party. Apparently, they had managed to talk their way into getting two of the last 10 tickets available at the door. Yay! And they also managed to find us in a crowd of thousands, which was even more impressive.

4h30-6h00: Magda

I liked this set less, although I’ve come to the realization that Magda’s style overlaps a lot with my own musical preferences, but at the same time rarely seems to work for me. I feel as if I should like her stuff a lot, but in the end I’m often rather lukewarm about it. The set started off at a slower pace and felt somewhat sluggish, and it meandered stylistically through electro, neo-acid-house, and even Sterolab-like dissonant atonal stuff, before finally landing in some solid, forward-driving techno. By about the mid-point of the set, I was back into it and enjoying myself.

At some point, a guy dancing energetically next to me noticed me at a point when Magda had dropped something exciting into the mix and I was dancing with renewed enthusiasm. He turned toward me with a long, drawn-out “Ouais!” (“Yeah!”), and then we proceeded through a complex, rapid, and improvised pas-de-deux of momentary togetherness. First we exchanged smiles and pumped our fists in the air towards the DJ. Then, he approached me and we danced “with” each other in the sense that we danced closely side-by-side and adapted our dancing to each other in a way that was sometimes mimetic and sometimes contrapuntal.

A friend of mine approached and said, “Oh, do you two already know each other?” (Clearly, my fellow dancer was also an acquaintance or friend of my friend.) This guy throws his arm over my shoulder and says, “Well, we do now!” And then we keep dancing together, his arm over my shoulders and mine around his waist, for a few minutes before drifting apart. I never really talked to him or got his name or anything, but for that moment we knew each other in some way, as if that moment of glancing contact was enough for some sort of relationship to emerge. Or maybe it was that we were referencing some timeless relationship, acting as if we were just continuing an already-established relationshp. It was interesting, too, that the first moment of substantial touch (arm over shoulders) happened just as this guy was claiming that we now knew each other. There’s something interesting in how temporality is collapsed and twisted in instances like these; it’s as if we don’t have time to begin and end a relationship when we’re colliding into each other on the dancefloor, and so we all improvise—relationality without relation, friendship without familiarity.

By 5h00, one of my friends ran out of energy and headed home, while the rest of us stuck it out until 6h00. At first, I left with a friend who had left his bags at my place, but then as we waited for the subway, another 6 of my friends showed up. Apparently, one of them went to the cloakroom to get something from her coat, and then the bouncers told her that the party was closing and she couldn’t get back into the main room. So she angrily had to call her boyfriend and get him to collect the remaining crew of friends to leave and join her.

The subway ride home felt like ages, but eventually I returned to my place with the friend who had left his stuff here. We ended up hanging out and chatting until about 8h00, when he decided to head back to his friends’ place (where he was staying) and I decided I needed at least a bit of sleep. I had to be at work by 12h00.

The grand mea-culpa update

2009-05-25T20:43:00.002+02:00

Yes. OK. Alright. I know. I know, dammit.

I’ve been absent from this here blog since the end of April, and you’ve been worried sick. I’m so sorry ; I didn’t mean to deprive you of the voyeuristic peephole into my life that this blog provides you, which is totally not creepy at all. I even got a message on my MySpace page from a worried friend, asking for at least some more closeup images of sausages. I see: you’ve missed me so much, you’re willing to settle for pictures of my sausage.

I’m sorry, OK? Stop sulking like that. Let me try to make it up to you. Here’s the first ¾ of the month of May, all smooshed into one long-ass post, in quasi-chronological order. I’ve included most of the important details (what I ate) and such. You see, on the last day of April I flew to NYC to spend a week with my sister—which was interrupted by a quick one-day visit to our hometown to see our new niece and to attend some bull!@#$ conference that my sister had to make an appearance at for her work. Then, Carla came back to Paris with me and we spent a week together here. Then, the day before Carla left, my friends Kristy and Iyn arrived at my door and stayed for another 11 days or so. I just packed them into a plane yesterday, so I haven’t been near my blog for nearly a month.

So without further ado, The Please-Don’t-Stop-Reading-My-Blog Catch-Up Super-Post (s):

Part the First: NYC w/ Carla

This trip involved tons and tons of walking. Whether in Central Park, all the way from the Upper East Side to Union Square, Jackson Heights, Harlem, The Bronx, or Coney Island, we were walking machines, I tell you. Mercifully, Carla and I are very similar tourists, so this is pretty much all we want from a vacation. Well, that and food.
April 30th : Over at CDG in Paris, me and nearly 40 people nearly missed the flight to NYC thanks to some insane security checks that USA-bound flights are now apparently required to do. There were nearly 200 people in line for all of the American Airlines flights (they had all the lines merged) and there were 4 people with laptops at the front of the line, spending nearly 10 minutes with each group of travelers, asking them detailed questions about their trip to the US, where they were staying, their occupation, the contents of their luggage, how long they’ve owned the items in the luggage, etc. And all of this was before you even reached the check-in counter. Upon seeing this in action in the airport, Dorothy Parker’s immortal words came to mind: “What fresh hell is this?” Suffice it to say, things were a total mess, and when the 1-hour deadline came and went, the head check-in clerk started to tell her underlings to close the flight to NYC. The 40 or so Francophone passengers at the front of the line waved at her frantically and made it clear that nearly half of the plane was still waiting to check in. When she tried to imply that this was our fault for waiting until the last moment to check in, she was quickly shouted down. Most of us arrived 2.5 – 3.0 hours early precisely to avoid this stupidness. Anyway, I caught my fucking plane and got to fucking NYC just fucking fine, thank you very fucking much. Fuckity fuck fuck. Carla was working until late, so I went for a short walk, had some lunch, and then bought the fixin’s for some curry, which I whipped up for her so that she would have something to eat after getting out of work at nearly 10pm.
May 1st : While Carla was at her last day of work before her vacation started, I walked all the way down Lexington Avenue from 67th St. to Union Square (14th St.), then back up Broadway to Central Park. I was just a little chafed after all of that, I admit. When Carla got off work, we headed down to Chelsea and then walked across the island to the Lower East Side, where we got dinner at The Essex. Carla had some sort of lamb thing that seemed quite nice, but I had this amazing “New American”-style mac-and-cheese made with Manchego cheese, which nearly required a change of underwear. After that, Carla and I met my cousin and her husband—who were in town for the weekend—at some rather swanky cocktail bar where we proceeded to get pretty drunk. We ended the night by walking through the Apple Store near Central Park, which is open 24 hours. Seriously.
May 2nd : Yay, vacation time for Carla! We slept in, and then headed over to Jackson Park for brunch. On a recommendation from one of her ex-coworkers, we headed to some random Columbian restaurant for a sort of late brunch / lunch. Carla had some sort of chicken platter with a ton of side dishes, while I had a whole fish baked in peppers and surrounded by fried plantain and yucca (cassava / manioc). It was fantastic and only twice as much food as either of us realistically needed. We were convinced that we would both be going to the gym religiously, so we bought a pair of rather dodgy gym shorts for me, so that I could accompany her to her fancy Manhattan gym. I never put them on during the entirety of my stay. While dropping off my sister’s clothes at the cleaners, we got distracted by the nice weather and ended up wandering through all of Central Park and a good chunk of the Upper West Side. By evening, it was clear that I was coming down with some sort of cold, so we cancelled our more adventurous dinner plans and just walked to the Baker Street Pub, which apparently served the best burgers in the neighborhood and had an Irish waitress for extra pubby authenticity or something. Good times, although my memory of the evening was a bit hazed out by the onset of whatever it was I had caught.
May 3rd : Started with a morning appointment at the Art of Shaving booth in Bloomingdales for a proper straight-razor shave. The barber was nice enough and seemed to know what he was doing, but he kept on talking through the whole thing, which made me nervous. After all, he has a very sharp blade to my throat. He did manage to nick me on my upper lip, which he tried to explain away as an “ingrown hair” that got in the way. Sure, buddy. Anyway, we met my cousin and her husband at PioPio for a pile of delicious Peruvian food, which was actually very authentically done. The ceviche was delish, as was the roast chicken, the parihuela (a Peruvian seafood soup) and whatever other stuff we ordered. It was a bit of a food orgy. After that, Carla and I walked down around Union Square and I eventually ended up buying the Nintendo DSi that I had been eyeing for a while. What an excellent (time-wasting) investment that has been. I’m only disappointed that there aren’t more language-learning / iPhone-like applications available for the platform. There’s an online shop for applications, after all. Aaanyway, we ended up ordering in sushi and having an early night of it, since we had a painfully early flight tomorrow morning.
May 4th : quick trip to London, Ontario. Scroll down to the section on our trip to London for the details.
May 5th : After yet another excruciatingly early flight back from Canada, we unpacked at Carla’s place and then headed down to the Clinton Street Bakery in the Lower East Village for some grub. There were plans to see the New Bowery art museum / gallery, but apparently most museums in NYC close on Tuesday, so we just went straight to the food. On the way back walking along Houston, Carla showed me a few of the old-fashioned Jewish delis, which were mobbed with locals and tourists alike. Dinner involved some lovely Japanese home-style coking at a restaurant called Donguri [LINK], in the company of a Japanese friend of my sister. The food was lovely, if rather expensive for the portions and ingredients.
May 6th : in the morning, we had a lovely but also somewhat sad walk along the boardwalk of Coney Island. That place seems to be well on its way out of existence ; most of it seemed closed and half-abandoned. We joined one of my old roommates from the Berlin days at Grimaldi’s, which is apparently an insanely-famous pizza place in Brooklyn. The pizza was definitely delicious and reasonably priced, although I’ll stop short of saying it was the best I’ve ever had. After that, Carla and I walked around the current ground-zero of NYC yupsters (yuppie hipsters), Dumbo (“down under the Brooklyn bridge”), which was rich in coffee shops and conceptual “gallery” stores. Carla needed to take care of some work before our departure to Paris the next day, so I made myself scarce by heading down to The Strand near Union Square. I got really distracted and managed to spend several hours digging through the 1$ racks. I scored (among other things) “Die Besten Erstlesungeschichte für Mädchen” (“The best starting-reader stories for girls”), which was at about my level of German : OMG ponies! Seriously, there’s a picture of a pony on the front cover. Anyway, I took way too long to get back to Carla’s place and we ended up just having a light dinner and drinks at an Italian wine bar near Carla’s place with another friend of hers.
May 7th : Carla was belatedly reminded that she had agreed to let some friend’s friends stay at her place while she was gone, so she suddenly felt the need to give the place a thorough cleaning before our departure this afternoon. I got out of her hair by heading up to the Bronx and taking myself on a long, long walking tour through the South Bronx and then down through Harlem. It was amazing to see places in upper Harlem that were still abandoned from even before the housing crisis. I had just assumed that all real-estate on Manhattan was taken and overpriced. Anyway, we regrouped in the afternoon for some gut-bustingly dense soul food up in Harlem and then headed over to JFK for our flight.

Part the Second: One-day trip to London, Ontario

So we headed out at about 4am Monday morning (the 4th) to the airport and had a relatively uneventful trip over to Toronto and then to London. The only shitty thing was that I wasn’t able to do a web check-in, nor was I able to check in at the self-service kiosk. I think someone with my name has been added to the no-fly list, because for every flight beginning or ending in the US during the trip, advance check-in was mysteriously unavailable and the counter clerk had to call some central agency, read off all of the data on my passport, and then wait for some sort of approval before booking me. Hooray surveillance state!
Anyway, our parents picked us up at the airport and then we headed over to my brother’s apartment, who was post-call (as a nephrology resident) and left alone with the baby for the weekend. As you can imagine, he was in bad shape. We coerced him into putting on some clean clothes and going for lunch, while the rest of us took turns feeding and cuddling and entertaining my new niece. “Grandma” and “grandpa” (i.e., my parents) were thrilled to fawn over her during lunch, giving my brother much-needed time to devour a whole rack of ribs. We went to Montana’s for lunch, since chain restaurants tend to be more baby-friendly.
Aurorita (my niece) is, of course, the most beautiful and talented baby in the whole world, as judged by an unbiased panel of her parents, grandparents, and uncle and aunt. She is generally a very happy and non-fussy baby, although her poops are more powerful than whatever North Korea is currently working on. Jeezus.
After dropping my brother back off at the apartment, my sister went to our hotel room to prepare for her conference and I disappeared with my parents. We swung back by the farm to pick up some yarn and knitting needles, and then I spent the rest of the drive into town knitting a slipcase for my Nintendo DSi. After a long walk around the downtown area, we ended up back in Victoria Park, where we spent some time sitting in the sun and enjoying the weather while I continued to work furiously on the slipcase. Ahh, bliss.
That evening, while my sister was trapped in a series of no doubt unpleasant dinner meetings, mom and dad and I went to this Cantonese restaurant on Springbank Drive that was situated in an old Tim Horton’s building. Boy, was that odd. Nonetheless, the food was excellent. Not only was it the best Chinese food of any regional style that I’ve had in London, Ontario, but it ranks among the best Cantonese I’ve ever had. The Peking duck was extraordinary, and the various dishes with mysterious names that my mom ordered were all delicious in turn. Apparently, she had been there a week earlier with a Chinese delegation and she took notes and came back demanding the same dishes. The waitress was a bit surprised when she gave us “gwai lo” (whitey) menus and then my mom started ordering all this stuff from the Chinese menu. Anyway, Carla arrived after her last meeting and managed to try a few of the dishes before calling it quits. We were painfully, painfully full.
We had another painfully early flight the next day, so we went straight to the hotel and crashed and then headed back out at 4am to the airport for another round of airport-tag.

Part the Third: Carla in Paris

May 8th : I actually had to go into work the same afternoon as we arrived into Paris to run a teleconference, so we had no time to be jetlagged. We had a light lunch and then took out Vélib bikes and headed over to my workplace (Carla’s experience biking in Manhattan has apparently prepared her well for Paris’s streets). While Carla went for a walk in Bercy park across the water, I set up the teleconference. By 19h00 or so, things wrapped up and we headed back to my neighborhood. Since we were already feeling tired, we decided to be lazy and have dinner directly underneath my apartment, at L’Homme Bleu. This Moroccan/Berber restaurant has a favorable review on Le Fooding and it always smells fantastic in the hallways of my building at about 19h00 each evening, so I was happy to finally try the place out. The food was delicious if a bit pricey for home-style Moroccan fare, but there was no doubting the quality and the generous portions. Between the sheer quantity of food we consumed and the buckets of wine, we were totally ready to crash by the end of dinner (keep in mind we didn’t really sleep on the plane).
May 9th : The day started with a trip to the an outdoor market on boulevard de Charonne, where we managed to acquire a tasty, tasty whole chicken. We made lunch out of it (with an almost perfunctory salad) and then tried to walk off the food over in the 17th arrondissement. An old friend that lived in the area had us over for a cup of tea, and then we went for a little meandering walk through her neighborhood of Batignolles. That evening, we went over to the house of a colleague of mine, who made us an excellent dinner—especially so considering that she was getting ready to leave for Chicago the next day. I only have vague memories of the dinner (thanks to some great wine I brought), but fresh asparagus was involved and so were some paupiettes, little dumplings usually made of ground meat stuffed into thin sheets of other meat.
May 10th : This day started as a leisurely stroll through Le Marais (which is one of the few neighborhoods open on Sunday, thanks to its history as a Jewish district), punctuated by a visit to L’As du Fallafel for Lenny-Kravitz-approved falafels and fancy hand-made marshmallows at Boulangerie Malineau on rue vieille du temple. We managed to walk all over the islands on the Seine and then back up to my neighborhood, where we had a sort of “dinner” at Le Bague de Kenza. Of course, I put that in quotation marks because what we really had was a few small savoury pastries followed by a mountain of sweet, sweet Algerian pastries. God, that was a huge pile of delicious sin.
May 11th : I don’t quite remember what we did during the day (after work for me, anyway), but we ended up having dinner at Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois, this odd restaurant on l’Ile Saint-Louis that apparently attempts to approximate Celto-Gallic cooking. The “salad” course is a massive basket of raw vegetables delivered to your table, which you hack away at until it is delivered to another table. There’s a self-serve cutting table at the front of the restaurant with a wide collection of prepared meats, including dry sausages, smoked meats, terrines, rillettes, and bean salads. You refilled your wine jug from a big barrel near the front of the restaurant, just opposite a massive pair of bison horns (or something similar). When you’re done your “appetizers,” a waiter comes over and asks you what cut of meat you want and how to have it cooked, and then they grill it for you over a charcoal oven right there in the restaurant. Considering that the desserts were clearly pre-made and probably supplied by a third-party kitchen, the only substantial service required of the staff was the grilling of the meat, so we wondered why the place had such a large staff. A staff, coincidentally, that were all relatively young, male, brown-haired, about the same height, and with similar Mediterranean / south-French looks. Carla quickly wove a complex backstory of gay sex and nepotism between the creepy manager and his stable of boytoy waitsaff, which caused us to spend the rest of the meal over-interpreting the smallest gesture from the personnel and nearly falling out of our chairs with barely-suppressed laughter. Oh, and we made friends with this quartet of very, very, very wealthy Mexicans at the table next to us.
May 12th : Of course, Carla couldn’t very well visit without a trip to Les Trois Marmites, where we had, for 21€, a better three-course meal than you can have for 61€ elsewhere in Paris. Delicious as always.
May 13th : Whenever Carla and I are alone in Paris, we splurge on at least one fancy, fancy dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Tonight it was Pierre Gagnaire, who has a reputation for offering very innovative creations in his tasting menu. It was, of course, excellent, but only a few of the 9 courses in the tasting menu were really earth-shakingly amazing. Generally speaking, he was really strong in the desserts and sweet-tasting things, but his meat and fish courses were less strong and his vegetable-centric appetizers were delicate but lacked the sort of spark and creativity for which he is supposed to be renowned. The service was very attentive and earnest, but lacked the sort of effortless poise and near-flawless care that we witnessed at Taillevent about two years ago.
May 14th : Carla really wanted to revisit Taillevent again, but we certainly couldn’t do two massive three-star dinners in one trip, so we made lunch reservations and did the three-course lunch menu (with two additional “sneaky courses”, as Carla called them). In general, our memories of the place were confirmed: every dish brought to our table was a revelation in deliciousness—a sort of arresting experience that often left us struggling to maintain composure; the service responsive, perfectly timed, and graceful without ever hovering or intruding; and the whole thing cost us about a third of our previous night’s dinner. To be fair, this was the lunch menu, but even Taillevent’s dinner menu is about 30% cheaper than Pierre Gagnaire’s. You can count us among those Parisian diners that don’t understand why this place was demoted to two stars. That night, by the way, we went to an Uighur restaurant up the street from my apartment (rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud). The food involved a lot of hand-pulled noodles, vaguely familiar spice mixes, and a texture that was somewhere between a curry and a stir-fry. Delicious and cheap. Between lunch and dinner, we had spent the day at the Bois de Vincennes admiring the castle, the chapel, the temporary exhibit of Bulgarian Icons, and then the floral park, which was gorgeous even in the pouring rain. Rhododendron season!

Part the Fourth: May 16th, One Night of Partying

Even though this happened after my sister had left and my other houseguests had arrived, this still felt like it was “in-between” their overlapping visits, so here it is.
After having dinner with Kristy & Iyn and leaving them to succumb to jet-lag at my place, I headed out to a friend’s birthday party at her boyfriend’s place near Bastille. At the party (which was otherwise lovely), some couple that nobody seemed to have invited got very drunk and proceeded to make out, grope, dry-hump, and quite possibly fuck all over the apartment. This included one moment when the girl spilled part of her drink while trying to jump up on her partner, and then he slipped on the puddle and crashed onto the (new) hardwood floor right on top of her. Both of them were too drunk to feel any pain. At some point, probably at the urging of the increasingly incensed host, they disappeared to the room where everybody had left their jackets. I inspected my jacket closely for jizz stains before heading out to my next “appointment.”
I made a brief visit to On Cherche Encore to see my friends PanPan and Aclank at their monthly soirée, Distance Minimale. I hung out with both of them as they took turns at the decks along with their guest DJs (whom I have managed to forget ; sorry!). About an hour after I had arrived at the bar, and two or three tracks into PanPan’s set, one of the bar owners came to tell him to cut the evening short; I overheard the phrase “grosse deception” (“big disappointment”). Then, three guys walked up to the DJ booth and started to hit buttons and turn knobs on the mixer until the music died out. While one tried to scratch PanPan’s records with the needle from the tonearm, the other yelled “Maintenant on va tous arreter à picoler!” (“Now, we’ll all stop drinking!”) In the confusion, the lights came up and the owners started pushing everyone to the door, announcing that we had these three men to thank for cutting the night short. I still haven’t figured out what that was all about, but those same three guys were standing at the door, trying to conduct some sort of argument with the bouncer and one of the owners.
So, all in all, the theme of tonight was “Lovely parties thrown by lovely people but marred by dicks—both literal and metaphorical.”

Part the Fifth: Kristy & Iyn’s Visit

May 15th : So there was one night of overlap with my sister’s visit, which made for some crazy times in my 220 sq ft apartment. After collecting them at the airport (while Carla, the dear, cleaned up my apartment), we dropped off the luggage at my place and then headed over to Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon for lunch. This is one of the last grand train-station restaurants in Paris, which has preserved its opulent interior. The price-to-quality ratio was certainly distorted by the history and décor of the place, so we ordered frugally and just enjoyed the view. After a bit of walking that afternoon, we returned to Les Trois Marmites for another lovely dinner (the staff must think I’m stalking them).
May 16th : After having some boulangerie-bought sandwiches for lunch and sending Carla off to the airport, we headed to the famous flea market of Saint-Ouen, where Kristy proceeded to get prices for very expensive tapestries and artwork for her clients back in Paris. There were no purchases that day—she needed confirmation from her clients—but it was fun to shop as if we could afford it. There’s something crazy about being able to just buy and sell objects that were made centuries ago…I dunno how I feel about it, really. I don’t recall what we did for dinner, but see above for my night of partying.
May 17th : after a slow start to the day, we hit a neighborhood garage sale in the Passage des Panoramas and then spent the rest of the day walking around the Marais. Much like the previous week with Carla, we ended up getting marshmallows at Boulangerie Malineau and falafels at L’As du Fallafel. Mmm. After a stop for coffee at a café on Place des Vosges and then a walk up to the top of the Parc de Belleville to see the sunset, we went home and I made my guests a some urad dal curry and Bhutanese red rice (which was delicious, if I dare say so myself).
May 18th : Kristy’s b-day! We got all dressed up and headed to Opéra Garnier to see a ballet called Onéguine, a ballet based on the Pushkin novel, Eugene Onegin, with a pastiche of music made of music by Tchaikovsky. The performance was excellent, overall: great sets, good costumes, excellent characterization through choreography, but the group numbers weren’t well synchronized. We were a bit aghast, though, to see how many people were attending a fancy show in such a fancy place in jeans and other casual wear. I mean, come on folks, when are you going to dress up if not for a show at the Opéra Garnier? Don’t you feel a bit weird in your athletic wear, surrounded by several tonnes of marble and gold and crystal? Sigh. Anyway, we afterwards went to dinner at Terra Nera, which has slid a lot in quality since I started going there, but still managed to please through sheer quantity of cream and cheese in their pasta dishes. I don’t know whether it was the lipid overload, the mixture of prosecco and mid-grade wine, or some cross-contamination in the food, but I spent that night on the verge of barfing. Yay!
May 19th : I had a grad student dinner at a prof’s place, so I helped my houseguests buy themselves some kebabs from the place up my street (they suggested the kebabs, not I), and then I headed off for dinner. Somewhat astoundingly, there were only four of us at the dinner and we polished off five bottles. Bravo us!
May 20th : Kristy and Iyn did the Louvre while I was at work, and then we caught up and headed over to the left bank for some amazing crêpe action at La Crêpe Rit du Clown. I only have vague memories of what we ate, but I do vividly recall a crêpe filled with molten marzipan and poached pears. I really need to go on a diet after this. Anyway, after a fair bit of walking in that area, we took the bus back to my neighborhood and had some drinks at the famous Café Charbon.
May 21st : My two friends headed out with their mp3 players in hand to do some sort of walking tour that they had downloaded, while I stayed home and did a bit of work and catching up. I also just chilled and lay still for a while, which was glorious. That evening, we headed over to L’Astier [LINK] for a birthday dinner in my honor (although it was nearly one month early). Appetizers included some sort of eggplant tart, an asparagus velouté, and a rabbit terrine. I had a roast pigeon, which was surprisingly tasty, while Iyn had an excellently-prepared cod and Kristy had a very meaty duck breast. I only remember the desserts vaguely, but there was roast pineapple and egg custard involved.
May 22nd : in an attempt to repeat the success I had had two weeks earlier with Carla, I took them to my morning market and then brought back a roast chicken, upon which we gorged ourselves. We walked it off with a trip to the Bois de Vincennes, including a quick walk through the castle and then an extended stroll through the floral gardens. That evening, we passed through Montmartre to pick up a massive amount of chocolate and candy for Kristy and her mother at L’Etoile d’Or of Denise Acabo, headed down to the St. Germain area on the left bank, and then walked over to the islands for a scoop of Berthillon ice cream. Dinner was again an at-home affair, where I oven-roasted a whole trout in parchment paper and Kristy made this lovely hot-cold salad with tomatoes and pine nuts and chick peas.
May 23rd : Kristy was determined to get some shoes to match the Skalli bracelet and the matching scarf that she had bought earlier that week, so we started our day off in Les Halles. Once Kristy had enough of Paris’s attempt at American-style shopping malls, we headed above ground for a quick stroll and a light lunch at Les Têtes Brulées in the Montorgueil district. From there, we walked all over Montmartre and hit the super-cheap shoe stores between Sacre-Coeur and Barbès-Rochechouart. We never found anything that matched her bracelet, but the walk was very nice. We eventually made it back to my neighborhood and bought a metric tonne of Algerian pastries at Le Bague de Kenza, which we deposited at my place after promising that, at dinner, we would skip dessert and eat them instead. For dinner, we checked out the little café on the corner across from L’Astier, called Les P’tites Indécises (“The little undecided things / indecisive ones”). The food was actually very good, although perhaps a bit pricey for a corner café. They managed to pull off a few attempts at fusion cuisine without appearing gimmicky or shallow. I had a large filet of sea bream prepared in a teriyaki glaze that was light and not too sweet, Kristy had an asparagus-parmesan risotto that was creamy without being too heavy, and Iyn inhaled his honey-roasted lamb so quickly that I can only assume he liked it.
May 24th : Kristy and Iyn had their flight at 16h00, so we got up a bit early and set out have one last walk through the city. I took them to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, which was gorgeous in this late-spring weather. We got croissants and coffee at the top of the hill and then walked down through the park, stopping to get pictures from every possible angle. Kristy noted that their trip had been a tour of Paris’s parks. I noted that the some species of tree had been pollinating those wispy white floaters all over the park, collecting in cottony bunches here and there, which means that the trees of Buttes-Chaumont had been jizzing on us all morning. These are the sorts of insights that make me a valuable guide to Paris, no doubt. We still had a bit of time, so we walked through the Parc de Belleville on the way back to my place, and then we hopped on the RER over to the airport. Alas, the last I heard from them was that there was a horrible connection in Atlanta on the way home and that they plan to avoid flying Delta in the future. But they’re home safe and sound!

So, after all that, I headed home and sat around my place, enjoying the sunny weather, catching up on stuff, and generally wasting time. Yay!

Radio silence this week

2009-04-20T14:10:00.000+02:00

Hey kids! Guess what? I've decided that I'm going to finish my revisions to my second chapter by this weekend, and I'm not allowed to blog until then. Rest assured that my life is currently very boring and un-blog-worthy, so you can just check out for now and come back next Sunday. In the meanwhile, here's something to tide you over:

No, I didn't call Africa for 6 hours, why do you ask?

2009-04-14T17:56:00.000+02:00

So, yesterday I got a call from my cell phone provider, SFR, telling me that I had an unusually high usage of long distance minutes. In fact, there were 230€ worth of calls. After a moment of confusion, I got more details on the consumption and the reasons became really clear: all of the calls were made to Africa, which I never call, and they were made during the space of time between when I lost sight of my old phone two weeks ago and when I blocked the line a few hours later. And the first phone call started minutes after I last remember having my phone in my hands, which means that I hadn’t lost my phone, but instead it had been stolen from me when I wasn’t looking. Hooray!

The woman on the phone told me to call the client services hotline to report the theft and ask them to refund the charges. When I called the hotline, the guy on the line told me that any charges incurred between the loss of the phone and the blocking of the line were non-refundable, but if I lodged a “déclaration de vol” (theft report) with the police and faxed it to them, SFR would check my phone records to ensure that these numbers had never been dialed before from my account, and then they would reimburse some or all of the charges. Yippee.

So today after work, I went to the commissariat near my workplace in the 13th arrondissement and spent nearly two hours filling out the theft report. It took ages to record all of the information, and even longer to get the document finalized, printed out in triplicate, and then signed and notarized. When all of that was taken care of, I called SFR to find out what number I should send the report to, and after three unsuccessful attempts at speaking to someone who could help me, I finally got through to someone who told me to just mail the whole thing in. Ugh, fine.

So anyways, that’s that for the time being. I now have to wait for about 5 days to hear back from SFR about what they’re going to do with those charges. Whee! Between this and the massive electric bill I got for the winter, I might as well just make a pile of money and burn it and then go live under a bridge.

Masomenos, my dear

2009-04-13T10:52:00.000+02:00

OK, I’m a good 1 week behind on blog posts and I don’t foresee catching up in the next few days, so here’s something to tide you over: recent releases by Masomenos, whose tracks have been getting more and more attention. Enjoy!

Sunday at Club der Visionaere

2009-04-12T23:53:00.000+02:00

When I got home from Berghain, it was about 14h00 or so, and I had plans to meet up with a friend from the Chicago scene (let’s call her Ellen, for ease of reading), so I got to bed and tried to get a few hours of sleep. At around 18h00 or so, I got up to take a shower and found a text message from Ellen, saying that she and a friend were at Bar25 already.

So I took a quick shower to make my body forget what I had done to it, put on a fresh set of clothes, and headed off to Bar25. The line at the door wasn’t very long, which at first felt like a relief, but the line was barely moving at all. This was partially because it was Sunday and, since the bar is open all weekend nonstop, anybody with a stamp from earlier in the weekend has the right to jump the line and enter. So there were lots of people bypassing the line and holding things up, but also the doorpeople were constantly concerned with exceeding capacity (like anybody checks in Berlin).

Anyway, both of the women running the door were clearly cranked up on speed or coke, and thus making little sense. They were cracking jokes, then arbitrarily picking people out of the line and sending them in, sending other people away, and leaving others to just wait and wait in line. At some point, they decided to start asking people that were leaving if the were planning to come back. If they said they were leaving definitively, then the doorperson would count the number of people in the departing group and try to find a group of the same size in the line. Since people were always leaving in groups and I was all alone in the lineup, I ended up spending nearly 30 minutes at the front of the line, waiting for them to let me in. Of course, the doorpeople here are famously fickle, so I couldn’t risk arguing with them.

Eventually, after calling me several times to see what the hell was going on, Ellen and her friend came out and we hopped into a cab toward Club der Visionäre.

When we got there, Matthew Styles was spinning, and the rumor on the dancefloor was that Ricardo Villalobos had arrived on his boat (which was indeed moored at the dock) and he might come spin later that night. How exciting! Villalobos is known for magically appearing at Berlin establishments (especially Club der Visionäre) late on Sunday for one last DJ set before the end of the weekend.

Anyway, Styles was spinning relatively minimal house (but with more frequent vocals) and a bit of techno, which Ellen and her friend preferred to what was playing at Bar25 (and from what I could hear while in the lineup, me too). It was a bit more upbeat and energetic, too.

Shonky, a Parisian DJ now moved to Berlin, is in the corner near Matthew Styles, chatting with another Frenchy guy in a black turtleneck (seriously). After a few minutes, Ellen and her friend and I end up moving near that corner to get a bit more space, and Ellen chats up the Frenchy dude after Shonky leaves (go Ellen!). It turns out that this guy is also a DJ, and that he would be filling in for Mr. Styles when he needed a break from his all-night DJ set to get a drink.

I never got the Frenchy guy’s name, but he put down this amazing track that just got all of us FREAKING OUT, and it turns out that it was that recent release from Masomenos called “Les Trois Petits Cochons” (The Three Little Pigs) [see previous link for sample]. Sometime this coming week, I’ll have to make a post on what Masomenos is up to these days. As Fantômette had described it a week ago, they’re something of a breath of fresh air to the minimal scene.

Anyway, by about 1h00 I realize that I might miss the last train to Florian’s place and that I had a train to catch, so I said goodbye and headed out in a hurry. I obviously had managed to obtain a contact high from all of the pot being smoked around me, because I caught myself spending 10 minutes closely inspecting an U-Bahn system map in the Märkisches Museum station. What was so interesting?!

Snax Club, Berghain, Picnics and Fisting

2009-04-11T21:16:00.002+02:00

Yes, all of this and more in today's post!

Having gotten home at the relatively early hour of 8h00 in the morning, I slept until about 13h00, when it was time to start getting ready for the day ahead of me. Florian and I were going to a picnic to celebrate the birthday of a friend of his, and then I was supposed to meet Bob, Donna and Janine at another Frenchy friend’s place for crêpes, and then off to the clubs for a night/morning/day of partying.

Florian and I had been given the task of making potato salad, and of course we were determined to make it the best potato salad ever. We headed over to Lidl to get some supplies, and then went back to his place to get to work. I made some mayo from scratch, replacing the vinegar with the juice of a lime and adding quite a bit of Dijon mustard. In addition to a finely diced onion, and some yogurt, we also threw in Bärlauch (leaves of Bear’s Garlic or wild garlic), which is a leafy herb that looks like basil but smells and tastes like garlic. By the end of it all, we had some very tasty kartoffelsalat.

By about 17h00 we were heading over to the birthday picnic, which was being held in a park near Zionskirche in Mitte. The birthday girl turned out to be Canadian (from Ottawa), as did her boyfriend (also Ottawa). There were four other friends in attendance, including a couple of Anglophones and two Germans (and some kids, of course).

The spread for the party was great and pretty vast, including piles of sparkling wine, meatballs made by someone’s German grandma, a carrot cake that could bring you to tears (with an icing that tasted like cookie dough with pudding consistency), hummus, tabouleh, and several other savories. At one point, I managed to put my plate on the bench, stand up to help someone with something, and then sit right back down on my plate, tomato sauce and all. I had the pleasure of asking Florian to help me wipe my butt, which prompted jokes about turning into an incontinent old couple. The picnic ended up running a lot longer than I had expected, eventually passing over to candlelight drinking in the park and then drinks at a Frenchy bar nearby (I think it was called “Visite ma Tante” or something).

By about 22h30, I made my move, hoping that I could still make it to my friend’s place in time to join them for crêpes. I was actually too full of carrot cake to eat anything, but I still wanted to hang out with them before heading out.

I had to run by Florian’s place first to change clothes and drop off some stuff, so that made me even more late for the crêpe party. I got to our friend’s place in Neukölln just before midnight, too late to join in the crêpes (not that I was hungry anymore), but in time to get some drinks in me and chat with the Frenchy Krew. Bob & Donna were planning to go home and nap and then hit Panorama Bar later, while Janine was going to go to Watergate to check out Steve Bug. Our host was going to stay in tonight (after having been at an outdoor party all day), but he invited us to join him at another outdoor event Sunday afternoon.

My plan was to spend the night at Berghain, starting with the Snax Club event and then moving up to PanoramaBar to meet my friends when they got there. Snax Club only happens once a year and none of us had ever been to it (indeed, 50% of our group couldn’t go, since it’s “men only”), so we spent a lot of time extrapolating about what it might be like. Here’s everything that we could gather from descriptions and information on the club’s website:

It happens once a year on Easter weekend
The doors between the PanoramaBar and Berghain rooms are shut and the ones between Berghain and Lab.Oratory are opened, essentially shrinking the space reserved for “normal” / “straight” clubbing to PanoramaBar, while expanding the sexclub portion of the building to two rooms.
It’s men-only, and is billed as a “pervy party,” which seems to imply that the sexual play will not be limited to a couple of darkrooms.
Lab.Oratory is reputed to be the most hard-core (gay) fetish sexclub in Berlin, with every night being devoted to some form of kink, including fisting, piss, scat, s/m, and numerous other fixations.

So with that, we imagined a nightclub space with lots of groping and grabbing on the dancefloor, lots of shirtless and nearly-nude guys, the stench of sweat and poppers, and a fair bit of fucking on the sidelines. Of course, since this is Berlin, this was all a vast underestimation of what was really going to take place there.

We hopped into a cab at about 1h30 to get our nights started, with plans to drop off Janine at Watergate, then me at Berghain, and then Bob&Donna at their hotel nearby. When we stopped at Watergate, Janine saw that the bouncer was one that she knew and so she managed to negotiation a line-pass for all of us. I was still determined to check out Snax Club, but Bob & Donna jumped out of the cab to follow Janine into the club.

Round One: Snax Club @ Berghain/Lab.Oratory

So there was no small amount of confusion about which lineup to take to get into the club tonight. Normally, there’s just one easily-visible lineup that gets you into Berghain/PanoramaBar, and then there’s a side entrance that the clientele of Lab.Oratory use, which never has much of a visible lineup. Add to this the fact that Lab.Oratory usually only has its doors open for a couple of hours between 22h and 24h (to encourage everyone to show up at the same time and get it on), and you can see why most Berghain-loving clubbers are used to just showing up and standing in the first line they see.

So tonight was confusing, because there was a MASSIVE lineup heading towards one door, and then at the same time you have a much shorter line heading towards the door that leads up the staircase to PanoramaBar. When I first got into the Snax Club line, I turned to a girl standing behind me and said, “Am I in the right line, here? I’m pretty sure this is for Snax Club.” It was her first night going to Berghain, so she was totally lost and about to spend an hour waiting to get into the wrong party. Thankfully, a few meters ahead, there was a bouncer checking to make sure that people were in the right line. He said, in a thick German accent, “Hier ist a fetisch partei, dere ist normaler partei.”

I should have been paying closer attention to what the bouncer was saying.

While waiting in line, I befriended a short little Spaniard from Valencia and a couple of statuesque Sicilians (one of which was pretty damn hot) among whom we all chatted in a mongrel mix of Spanish and Italian. One of the Sicilians had lived in Argentina for a while, so conversation quickly turned to “why the rest of the Hispanophone world can’t stand Argentines,” which got pretty boring pretty quickly.

So when we got to the front of the line, a guy in front of us had a brief exchange with the bouncer, and then he dropped his pants to show that he was wearing a jockstrap underneath. I wasn’t paying close attention to the conversation, but that started to set off some red lights in my head. And then, the Sicilian couple in front of me ran into some trouble:

Bouncer: What are you going to wear inside?

Sicilian Dude: What do you mean?

B: This is a fetish party. You can’t go in looking like that. Do you have a jockstrap or something?

SD: No, but we can take off our shirts or something…

B: Where’s the fetish in that? No. Go home and change into something fetish and you won’t have to wait in line; I’ll let you right in. But you’re not getting in like that.

Well fuck. I’m certainly not dressed in anything approaching fetish gear. I let the little Spaniard next to me go ahead of me and keep the bouncer busy while I pondered my options. I had to think fast, as the Spaniard’s military-style cargo pants were apparently getting him in without much comment. I suppose I could just go to PanoramaBar and forget Snax Club, but I should at least try to negotiate with the bouncer here, in the hopes that he might let me jump the Pano line if he turns me away. Also, this is the bouncer with the lip piercing that has let me jump the line twice before, so there’s a chance that he might be lenient with me. Nonetheless, offering to take off my shirt wasn’t likely to work, especially since he just sent away two guys who had offered the same thing. Clearly, I’m going to have to double-down on the nudity.

Me: I’ll go naked.

Bouncer: What?

LMGM: I don’t own any fetish gear, but I can strip naked. A lot of guys are going to do that, anyway.

B: Hm, well, totally naked? Seriously?

LMGM: Totally. I promise. I might keep my shoes on, mind you.

B: Um yeah, you’d best keep those shoes on. Alright, go in.

Phew. I wasn’t sure what I had gotten myself into, but I (correctly) assumed that the coat check wasn’t within the line of sight of the door, so the bouncer wasn’t likely to check on me to see that I was vollnakt. I asked the guy at the ticket booth whether I could use the same ticket to get into PanoramaBar later, and he said I would get half price. Not ideal, but fair, I suppose.

I checked my jacket and scarf, and also threw in my brightly-coloured t-shirt, leaving just my undershirt, which seemed more appropriate for the evening. Indeed, everyone else was in fetish gear, especially of the sort that was either made of a few straps of leather or had the ass cut out of it. Lots of piercings and tattoos and bare chests and jockstraps and facial hair and hey, is that guy actually fingering his partner in the coat-check line?

So that’s how the evening started. I actually found myself taking off my shirt within an hour or so and stuffing it into my shoulder bag. The vast majority of guys were at least shirtless (if not much more), so I felt a bit out of place with my titties covered. I’m not one for stripping, but I felt like I was completely clothed, compared to the folks around me.

So how to describe the scene at Snax Club? Well, to put it concisely, these folks don’t fuck around. They sure do fuck a lot (and lick, and suck, and fist, and many other things), but they sure don’t do it halfway.

To begin with, the Lab.Oratory floor, which usually serves as a sexclub on regular nights:

There was grabbing and groping and necking on the small-ish dancefloor in the center of the complex, with the occasional bit of oral sex and fingering at the edges of the crowd.
Take any one of the hallways leading out from the dance area to hit the darkrooms / orgy spaces, which are massive and labyrinthine.
To the right of the dancefloor is a hallway with a sort of sling-gallery; there are a alcoves with slings in them, each one filled with a guy taking one or two fists up his ass and/or cock. The air is pretty ripe with the smell of sweat and lube (but to the fistees’ credit, not a whiff of feces).
Further down the hallway is the famous bathtub. It stands there, alone in an alcove, a testament to the more raunchy practices of this sexclub. The bathtub serves as a place for piss and scat play, from what I understand. Tonight, there’s a guy in a full-body gimp suit lying in the tub, but nobody seems to be doing anything about it. I watch where I step and move on.
The hallway comes to an end and branches off to the left and the right. The right leads to a dead-end corner where some guys are standing around jerking off and looking at each other. The left branch leads to the massive orgy space behind the dancefloor proper.
In the large space behind the dancefloor, they’ve put in a “special theme playground,” which is made to look like a construction site. There’s a concession truck parked in the middle being used to sell drinks, and then there’s a sort of tent to the left that has been divided into various cubicles by PVC sheeting to create semi-private spaces. To the right is a labyrinth of netting and plastic sheeting, with a couple of construction-site office trucks parked in the corners and a large plastic kiddie-pool that is currently being used for piss play (at least, that’s what it smells like). Again, I watch out for puddles and push on.
There are some toilets in one corner of the building (for those who prefer not to do it on someone’s slave).
Near the entrance, there’s a nondescript stairway that leads up to a gallery space where a couple of “cages” have been set up, so that guys can engage in prison-sex fantasies or maybe show off while assuring that enthusiastic fans won’t grab at them.

Now, on to Berghain, which is not normally a sexclub, although the gay crowd there still tends to be pretty hot & sleazy on regular nights:

The dancefloor was unchanged, and the only major difference was that there was much more nudity than usual on the dancefloor.
They hung sheets in the seating area near the bar (where the swing is) and along the catwalk that goes across the back of the room, creating a series of darkly-lit corners and half-hidden spaces for sexual play. There certainly is some sex going on, but it’s not quite as hard-core as downstairs.
Every once in a while, somebody gets head or a rim-job while ordering his drink
The darkrooms are densely packed and full of fucking, especially the darkroom area on the main floor. I tried to walk through and get a good look, but I couldn’t even get through the press of bodies.
Thanks to the fact that you could have sex pretty much anywhere, the bathrooms were uncharacteristically quiet and free of sex-related detritus.

I kept on moving around from one floor to another, and too often to really keep track of DJ sets, but Ben Klock put in a good (if somewhat overly violent) set in Berghain, followed by an excellent set by nd_baumecker. Boris was spinning for a while in Lab.O, which was pretty unexciting, but I’ll admit that I’m not a huge fan of his work.

I did manage to make the acquaintance of a nice Italian chap, who managed to keep me entertained (along with a dude from Australia) for a substantial portion of the evening. We traded phone numbers and email addresses, and I now have a standing invitation to visit London, England. Yay, intimacy! It was pretty hilarious, explaining the topic of my dissertation to this guy in this context.

Round Two: Panorama Bar

9h00-12h00: Daniel Stefanik

By about 9h00, it was time to head over to Panorama Bar. My friends were planning to get there around then, and I was getting a bit tired of all of the mansex. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for the hedonist fun, but I was having a hankering for being in a place where I could sit down or lean on something without first checking that I wasn’t about to coat myself in someone else’s genetic material. Call me a prude.

Anyway, as promised, I was able to get into Pano for half price, which came to 5€. And considering the excellent set Daniel Stefanik put on, it was the best 5€ I spent all weekend. His set was pretty much exactly what I like about the PanoramaBar sound, combining a very warm and bright minimal house sound with tooth-rattling bass kicks and (rhythmically, melodically) mobile basslines. At some point in the set, he put down a white label record that sounded awesome. It was in the “tropical minimal” vein that has been emerging in this last year, including almost purely acoustic Afro-Caribbean percussion for the drum patterns and a sample of group singing (again, sounding like a field recording from somewhere in Central Africa) deep and low in the mix, fading in and out like a sonic wash, rather than dominating the track like a typical vocal sample. It’s hard to describe the track in detail, but something about the ensemble of elements struck me as fucking fantastic.

Alas, white labels are thus called because they don’t have identifying labels on them. They are usually test presses of soon-to-be-released tracks that are passed to influential DJs to “test” on the dancefloor before the final mix is pressed and shipped. I tried to get a hold of the guy when his track ended to ask him what that white label was, but he quickly disappeared into the crowd.

Bob & Donna showed up shortly after I did, but alas just after I had heard that excellent white label—so I was left struggling to describe the track to them.

12h00-13h00: Boris

Ya know, this set was better than usual. Yes, this is a prime example of damning with faint praise, but my expectations have become pretty low with this guy, so this was a pleasant surprise. He still managed to have two near-trainwrecks within the first few minutes of the set, but at least his track selection and sequencing felt a bit more coherent. Usually, when I see Boris spin here, he throws a whole jumble of different styles together without much to connect them. Some DJs can pull of very eclectic sets like that, but it takes some serious skills, especially in ordering the tracks in a way that will create something more than a “parade of tracks I like.”

Regardless of my own reservations, the homos of Berlin seem to luuuurrrrve Boris, and turn out in droves for his set. I dunno, maybe Berlin gay guys—however hardcore fetish-y and hypermasculine—still enjoy a bit of “handbag house” from time to time. Either way, Boris’s appearance up here in PanoramaBar prompted a mass migration of guys from Snax Club (which I think was closing up at this point). Not all of these “migrants” changed their outfits before coming upstairs, so there was some amusement in the crowd as a couple hundred men showed up in leather, plastic, and rubber with their asses hanging out. Of course, the sort of hipsters that frequent PanoramaBar/Berghain are already inured to the sleazier aspects of gay nightlife (and value these sorts of things as an index of “open-mindedness”), so the amusement was mostly limited to giggling, some pointing, raised eyebrows, and the occasional curious question (“How do you even put that thing on?”).

Nonetheless, there were certain moments that tested the limits of the regular PanoramaBar partygoers. For example, I was in the smoking area with Bob when this skinny, near-naked guy appeared. I remembered seeing him around in Snax Club, because he was walking around naked and his gargantuan saline-injected balls were hard to miss. Yes, dear reader surprised at your own vanilla-ness, there exists a fetish around injecting saline into your balls and/or cock to make it look like you have a very particular and acute case of elephantitis. If you need to, take a break to wash out your eyes, cuddle a furry animal, and maybe listen to 70s music un-ironically. Feel better? OK, let’s continue.

So the fact of this guy’s massively-inflated balls was pretty visible at this point, because he was only wearing a well-worn jockstrap, the elasticity of which had given way, thus giving the impression that he was smuggling 1kg worth of plums under there. Two other guys that were just hanging out and smoking noticed this, and one of them pointed to his bulge with a smirk on his face and said, “What the fuck’s going on down there?” Obligingly, Mr. Balloon-Balls pulled down his jockstrap.

Both guys were clearly surprised, but that affective jolt went in different directions for each of them. One gave a shocked guffaw, as if he had just witnessed some particularly absurd, Monty-Pythonesque slapstick, while the other one threw his hands in the air and walked out of the room with his eyes wide, as if to say, “Woah. I give up. Let me off this ride.”

A minute or so later, Mr. Balloon-Balls was joined by a guy dressed in a black leather outfit that covered his entire body except for his ass and cock (and balls), which offered some rather impressive piercings. Mr. Balloon-Balls decided to greet him with a blow job, and so he bent over, with his asshole winking at the rest of us, and went to work. A third guy, who just happened to be passing by, took the initiative of spanking him roughly.

Sitting on stools near me and Bob were two girls, smoking, dressed in their Berlin-techno-hipster finest. Oversized 70s secretary glasses, ruff-necked blouses tucked deep into high-waisted skirts, and second-hand pumps. The looked at each other with this searching look, as if palpitating the other’s face to find some hint of what the other would do about this. Should they be shocked or blasé? In the end, they settled for a smirk and raised eyebrows, in a sort of understated “Well, isn’t that something.”

A bit later, Donna finds me on the dancefloor and says, “Hey, there’s a woman walking around in just a g-string and a t-shirt!” A few minutes later, as I’m walking out of the bathroom, I see the woman she was talking about. A quick look at her g-string and her adam’s apple made it clear that any gender classification would be more complicated than just “woman.”

Also, as I was coming out of the bathroom, a tall guy that I recognized from many previous Berlin nights stopped me, saying:

Random Dude: Hey, I bet you like house music.

LMGM: Yep! I sure do.

RD: In fact, I think you love house music.

LMGM: Lemme think about it…yes. Yes I do.

RD: You see, man, I’ve lived here in Berlin for many years and soon I have to move far away and so I am very high tonight and house music has always been so important for me and when I come to Berghain it is so nice to see people who love the music and don’t just do drugs but drugs are sometimes nice and everybody likes to have fun but it makes me happy to see people like you who are here for the music.

LMGM: Yes, totally.

I’ll admit that I didn’t totally follow what he was talking about, but it seemed that all he wanted from me was a sort of approving, reflective presence. I just needed to say yes, smile, put my hand on his back when he draped his arm around my shoulder, look him in the eyes, listen, and nod. In other words, all of the gestures of intimacy. I don’t think it was a fake intimacy, either; even if I wasn’t in the same affective place as he was, there was something about the simple fact of being in one another’s presence and the vagueness of anonymous contact that allows for warmth to pass where understanding and knowledge sometimes can’t.

13h00-??: nd_baumecker

I had only heard a few tracks from this guy (which were great), when my feet told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to go home. Fine. I had already seen nd_baumecker earlier in SnaxClub. I said goodbye to Bob & Donna and started making my way to the exit.

While picking up my jacked from the coat check, there were three guys dressed in fetish gear engaging in blow-jobs and rimming just across the room. Again, nobody was showing any shock or outrage, but there were a lot of smirks and raised eyebrows.

BerlinForEaster: Andy Weatherall & Man-Sandwiches

2009-04-10T21:49:00.000+02:00

After our somewhat late night of drinking (with me dragging my luggage behind me), we slept in today and Florian made me a lovely eggy and bagel-y breakfast. After that, I got a message from Janine saying that she wanted to meet me in a patio/biergarten somewhere for drinks and brunch. I told her we had already eaten breakfast, but that we would certainly meet her for some coffee / juice / drinks.

So we decided to meet in a café on Kastanienallee, and then Florian and I headed out make the trip on foot. The weather was really fantastic and sunny, so we were both thrilled to be getting some sun and walking around outdoors. We eventually got to a café right near Rosenthaler Platz called Yumcha Heroes, which specialized in Asian food and had a nice natural wood deck out front. So we picked a sunny spot and ordered ourselves some fancy fresh juices (mine was a bit over-thick).

Time passed, and passed, and passed. Janine is rather famously late to everything, so we weren’t completely surprised. Nonetheless, she was taking a really long time, so eventually Florian and I parted ways, as he needed to go visit a friend of his in Kreuzberg.

I eventually got a message from Janine, saying that she was on her way up Kastanienallee. I was practically at the bottom of the hill, so I was sure she would come around the corner any minute. After 15 minutes, I get a message from her saying, “Where exactly are you?!” I call her and we figure out that she had skipped the part of the street at the bottom of the hill (where I was waiting) because the street there changes its name to something else. So she had taken the tram halfway up the hill to where Kastanienalle properly starts, and then continued walking up until the street ended at the U-Bahn stop. Anyway, at this point Janine was hungry and tired and a bit frustrated, so I told her to just grab a table at a café near her and I would be over in a few minutes.

When I joined her at the café, I was about to wish her a good Passover, when I noticed that the food she had ordered included leavened bread, dairy products, and pork sausage. So I teased her about being a bad Jew and defended herself by saying that at least she had removed all of the leavened bread from her house last night.

Anyway, we engaged in standard girl-talk for a while (love life, clothes, travel plans, partying), and then we spent a lot of time talking about her job. She’s not happy at her job right now, so she was weighing her options and trying to figure out what to do next.

At around 18h00, I rushed back to Florian’s place to meet up with him and head out to catch a movie. The showing was at 20h00 at Potsdamer Platz, so we really didn’t have time to make any dinner. Instead, it was a mad dash over to the theatre to buy tickets, than a “dinner” in the form of mediocre pastries from a nearby bakery.

The film was called Tropical Malady, by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The movie is in two parts; the first part involves a rather quiet and affectionate love story between two men, while the second part recasts the men as a soldier at a rural outpost hunting a shape-shifting tiger shaman. The link between the two sections of the story is that, at the end of the first section, one of the lovers disappears into the jungle. It’s certainly an odd movie, but with a lot of elements that I like, including long scenes documenting daily life without containing plot development, quiet intimacy, and carefully-selected sound that seems to magnify emotion and affect.

Anyway, we wandered out of there in a bit of a daze and started looking for a place to grab a drink. Janine was planning to join us for drinks, but she never answered her phone or called/messaged back. We tried Bar Drei in Mitte, but it was closed (bar observe Good Friday?!) so instead we hit Das Blaues Band on Alter Schönhauser Straße for a couple of drinks before heading back home. Just as I arrived at Florian’s place, I got a message from Janine, saying that she had fallen asleep and would text me again when she woke up. I was confused by what that meant, so I decided to just head out to Watergate, where we had been planning to go, anyway. My friends Bob & Donna (who have been my Berlin companions pretty much every time I’ve been here since the fall) were also planning to be there, so I was eager to get to the club to hang out with them.

Round One: Yes! Night at Watergate

When I got to the club, the lineup already stretched nearly to the door of the next club down the street, so I braced myself for a long wait. As it would turn out, the lineup would take about half an hour to clear.

I was standing behind a group of four Belgian guys, who soon started chatting with three or four Brits ahead of them. They were wondering about how fast the line was moving and what chance they had of getting turned away at the door. Based on the fact that they were two large groups of guys and they were guzzling from beer bottles while in line, I was willing to bet that they would have trouble getting in, but I kept my mouth shut and pretended to be a local. The bouncers keep an eye on the lineup, and I didn’t want them to think that I was attached to the tourist sausage-fest before me.

As expected, the bouncer didn’t let either group in, and he seemed to think that I was part of the group. I stood well away from them as they left, and when the bouncer looked over at me to see why I wasn’t leaving, I said that I was all alone. That seemed to clear things up for him, and then he waved me through with no comment. Phew! Ironically, I would see the Belgian guys again at PanoramaBar a few hours later.

0h00-3h00: Mitja Prinz?

I’m not entirely sure that this was Mitja Prinz or spinning, but whoever he was, he seemed to be doing pretty well for himself. His set was pretty squarely in the “minimal” vein, tending more towards techno than house, with that emphasis on heavy bass kicks that marks Berlin techno. The set itself was good but maybe not fantastic, as the pacing seemed to feel a bit flat. It didn’t feel like it was really going anywhere, but instead going in circles. Nonetheless, I had no trouble getting my dance on.

Bob and Donna seemed to agree, too, when I found them dancing at the front of the main room, near the DJ booth. They were hanging out with a DJ friend from England, with whom I chatted for a little while before he turned in early to pack his bags for a plane he had to catch the next day. Nice guy.

While we were dancing and waiting for the headliner to start, I witnessed some sort of high-school drama unfold around the DJ booth. It seemed to involve two women: one was more femme, with shoulder-length blonde hair styled meticulously and a short plaid sundress; the other was more butch, with her hair in a tight bun, a black tank top, black warm-up pants, and wire-rimmed glasses. The femme gal was yelling at the butch one and getting in her face and generally being aggressive, while the butch girl was staring at her with a mixture of disdain and confusion and holding her hands up in a gesture that said, “Woah, chill out, what’s your deal?”

The femme girl quickly turned to a guy that seemed to know them both and started to yell at him. He yelled back, gesturing to the butch girl and also to the DJ, and then turned away from her as if he wanted to hear nothing more from her. The femme didn’t like what she heard, and stared at her drink miserably, before turning to the butch, yelling something venomously, and then walking off into the crowd.

The butch leaned in and spoke briefly with the guy, turning her palms up in a sign of confusion and exasperation, then punching her palm in a gesture of frustration and anger. For the rest of the night, the femme girl would dance nearby and glower at the butch, and the butch would do her best to ignore her and occasionally roll her eyes.

From what I could gather, the fight seemed to have something to do with being allowed into the DJ booth, or maybe getting too close to / flirting with the DJ. Both of the women seemed to be part of the crew attached to the DJ, so that was certainly possible. Also, when the femme (who was also acting pretty drunk, I might add) walked into the DJ booth and started dancing behind the DJ, the guy that had been involved in the argument earlier dashed into the booth and yelled at her again, sending her back onto the dancefloor. Anyway, it was odd to watch this cold-war fight continue through the rest of the night, while everyone else was dancing and having fun.

3h00-5h00: Andy Weatherall

A few minutes into this set, we discovered that we had a romantic trio developing behind us. Two guys—of the black-leather-jacket-wearing Eurotrash sort that usually doesn’t make it into Watergate—had found a rather drunk girl that wasn’t saying “no” to being felt up by both of them. They both were grinding on her at the same time, forming the sort of “man sandwich” that says, “Later on, we’re going to bang you from both ends.”

I’ve always found this sort of thing interesting among straight guys. On the one hand, the scenario of a woman being fucked in two or three orifices seems to have a strong erotic charge for a lot of straight men, and yet actually making it happen means getting naked and getting physically close to another guy. At the physical level, at least, a hetero gang-bang involves more man-man sexual contact than most hetero guys would be normally comfortable with. Anyway, I spent the next few minutes amusing myself by imagining what would happen if the girl dancing between them suddenly disappeared and the two guys found themselves making out with each other.

Andy Weatherall’s set was pretty fine, although Bob & Donna were very disappointed. They’ve seen him play numerous times at Fabric in London and loved him, but here they found that his set was too abstractly minimal and lacking in the sort of pounding force he usually plays with. We hung in there for a bit longer, but Bob & Donna couldn’t stand the disappointment and suggested we head over to another club.

Round Two: Hotel Club

We jumped into a cab and tried to make our way to a club called Hotel-Club, which was apparently hosting Jan Krüger tonight. I didn’t know the address and Donna only had a vague memory of it being near Berghain, so we hoped the taxi driver might know the place. He didn’t and we had no way of figuring out where to go, so we gave up and went to Panorama Bar.

Round Three: Panorama Bar

3h00-6h00: RNDM

Since we got here at around 5h30 or so, we only caught a short part of RNDM’s set. It was pretty good, very much in keeping with the PanoramaBar sound, but nothing to write home about. Nonetheless, we were all more enthusiastic for the sound here than what we had at Watergate.

6h00-9h00: Daniel Bell

Like the DJ before him, Bell’s set was good but not earth-shattering. He came out with a few tracks that were excellent and really got the crowd going, but between those excellent tracks were long stretches of adequate tracks. His mixing skills are certainly impeccable, but it didn’t feel like he was doing much more than just linking together the tracks with skill. Efficient, efficacious, but not rapturous.

Surprisingly, I have no amusing or interesting stories from PanoramaBar tonight. All three of us danced a lot, had a good time, drank liberally, and commented on the tracks we liked and disliked, but there were no escapades to report.

Bob & Donna really wanted to see Pantha du Prince, who was coming on at 9h00, so they headed home at around 7h00 to take a nap and come back later. I headed out about a half hour later, thinking that I should have at least a bit of sleep before going picnicking with Florian tomorrow.

The Great Gay Migration of 2009

2009-04-09T11:47:00.001+02:00

Off to Berlin!

So, on my flight to Berlin (which was AirFrance this time; hooray for in-flight drinks!) I got the impression that it was The Great Gay Migration of 2009. The plane was packed with gay couples and groups heading over to Berlin. Partially, this might’ve been because it’s Easter weekend, and a bittersweet legacy of the rejection many queer folks face upon coming out is that “family” holidays are better spent elsewhere.

But I also noticed that they were mostly guys that “looked the part” for the kinkier “poppers and backrooms” demographic of Berghain. There’s a “special” night at Berghain this Saturday called “Snax” that involves connecting the sexclub Lab.Oratory to the main Berghain room, and separating PanoramaBar from Berghain proper. The Labo/Berghain section becomes a men-only “pervy party”, while PanoramaBar remains the usual same. Anyway, it’s apparently a big yearly event, so I’m guessing that this has managed to elicit a mass migration of pervy men from Paris. Go figure.

Upon arriving in Berlin, I heard from Florian (my impeccable host) that he was at an art exhibit at the Temporäre Kunsthalle over near the Berliner Dom. Thankfully, the TXL bus runs right down Unter den Linden, so I rode my way over in comfort. Alas, I misjudged the stops and ended up getting down at Marienkirche and walking back, but it was fine.

After hanging out at the party/art opening with a few former co-workers of Florian’s, we started heading over to the tram stop at Hackescher Markt. On the way, Florian mentioned that there was a gay bar/lounge nearby called “The Sharon Stonewall Bar,” which clearly required a visit—if only because of the name. The bar was trying almost too hard to be gay, what with the pink lighting and décor, the 70s disco background music (Donna Summer!), and a silent screening of The Wizard of Oz (seriously). Anyway, we had a couple of drinks, realized that we hadn’t eaten much that evening, felt a bit trashed, and finally hobbled our way over to the tram stop and headed home. Yay, Berlin!

The meter reader cometh

2009-04-08T11:46:00.001+02:00

Today, I discovered that the electricity bills that I’ve been getting for the past 6 months have just been estimates based on previous consumption. Which means that they haven’t been an accurate reflection of what I’ve actually been consuming. And so I didn’t notice that the power-hungry space heater I used during this very cold winter was eating up kilowatt hours like candy. The result: after a recent meter-reading, a 300€ “adjustment” bill. Yay! Thankfully, I stopped needing the heater in mid-march, so hopefully the electricity consumption will drop significantly for the rest of the year. Gah.

Figatellu / Figatelli

2009-04-07T00:12:00.000+02:00

So I was out buying some French dry sausage to take to a friend in Berlin, and I came across an interesting, dark-coloured sausage that I bought for myself. It’s very dry and yet not all that firm, having a somewhat chunky crumbly texture inside that forces you to slice it rather thickly. And yet the flavor is slightly sweet, slightly tangy, just smoky enough, and full of the sort robust flavor that you usually find in iron-rich red meats. Check out the texture in these pictures I took (including some food-porn closeups):

See? Pretty hot, eh?

As it turns out, the sausage is a Corsican variety called figatelli or figatellu, which (according to this French Wikipedia page and this English blog) is made from a combination of ham, pork liver, and pig’s blood. Yes, you read that right.

Let me be the first to say that I’ve never much liked black pudding (i.e., blood sausage), and I’m not a big fan of liver (with foie gras being my guilty exception), so I know that I probably wouldn’t have bothered trying this one if I had known what was inside it. I saw that the name had “fig” in it, and, knowing that French and Italian share the same root word for the fruit, I assumed that it would be a standard smoked pork sausage with a bit of dried figs interspersed. Ironically, the expectation of dried figs helped me ignore the over-soft texture at first, which I really should’ve recognized immediately as coagulated blood.

So if this hasn’t turned you off entirely already (bravo!), give this a try next time you see it at your local butcher / meat market.

some bumps in the RATP's politeness campaign

2009-04-06T22:08:00.000+02:00

So, recently the RATP (the company that runs the subway system in Paris) started a new publicity campaign, called Aimer La Ville (“Loving the City”). Part of their campaign involves making subway-riding more pleasant by encouraging the riders themselves to be more pleasant. Thus, I’ve been seeing the following stickers around various subway trains:

Roughly translated, they mean “1 second lost in the station = delays on the whole line” and “when the doors open, I let people get off first.” There’s more, which you can find on these various blogs.

What you’ll also see if you read those blogs (and if you can read French) is that lots of people are not at all pleased with the implication of this publicity push: the problem isn’t with the métro, it’s with YOU. Also: rather than improve the system’s service, we’ll just cajole you into being more docile.

So it should come as no surprise that some people were inspired to respond with parody. Nonetheless, I was impressed with the quality of some of it. Today, on the way to work, I saw a sticker that perfectly duplicated the rainbow-gradient design and lettering, spoofing the sticker that usually says “when the buzzer goes off, I don’t try to jump on.” Instead, the sticker said, “quand j’entend le signale sonore, je pousse des vieux!” (when I hear the buzzer, I push old folks!) The duplication was so well done, I had to read it twice before I realized that it was a joke.

Well played, well played.

baby steps, baby

2009-04-05T21:26:00.000+02:00

Not much to report for today, aside from being very, very tired from the night before and spending ages working on various tasks. I managed to get somewhere with my chapter revisions, but hit a wall with the transition from my review of intimacy literature to the discussion of touch as a mode of intimacy. I have pretty much cut out the intimacy review (to be moved to the intro) and replaced it with about 2 pages of summarizing. So now my discussion of touch needs to bear the weight of the whole chapter, which I think will require a more substantial reorganization than my mind could handle today. Nonetheless, it was nice to be able to check off the item on the list that said “work on chapter.”

Taxes and other demons

2009-04-04T21:17:00.001+02:00

Well, I managed to sleep in thunderously late and feel all groggy. I didn’t fare much better when I started preparing to file my taxes.

You see, normally UofC’s office of international affairs (i.e., int’l students like me) offers an online tax application that helps you prepare your federal tax returns. However, this is only if you qualify as a non-resident alien. Somehow, I’ve managed to maintain that status for years before, but as of this year I count as a resident alien, which means I’m beholden to the same tax regulations as regular U.S. citizens. This is great in some instances (i.e., no taxation on scholarships), but it has its downsides. To wit, this online application won’t help me prepare my tax return as a resident alien, and most of the free tax-filing programs in the U.S. (for low-income folks) don’t know how to handle filing for resident aliens.

So I spent about 8 hours today scouring the web for the appropriate documents, reading pages upon pages of instructions, and hobbling my way through my own return. It was a colossal pain in the ass, I tell you, and I had a headache to show for it.

After all of it, though, I was able to get out of the apartment for a bit for some drinks. I headed to a friend’s bar, called “Ave Maria,” which was only a few blocks away from my place. The theme was Brazilian / pan-Latino apparently, with the appropriately kitschy and brightly-coloured décor. The place was packed waaaay more than I would’ve expected. I also didn’t realize that it was a restaurant as well as a bar, which became clear when I walked in and the whole place was rammed with tables that had every seat taken by diners and drinkers. Fun!

My friend was working at the bar, which made chatting with him pretty difficult, but we managed to say hello and he threw me a free mojito, so all was well. A little while later, a Franco-American friend of mine appeared in my neighborhood, so I went to pick her up from the métro station and then we headed over to On Cherche Encore to see Fantômette spin with another friend of ours. Unfortunately, everybody was apparently burnt out from the previous night (there were three big events going on), so the turnout was pretty disappointing. On the upside, though, I was able to chat with Fantô and introduce her to my Franco-American friend as well. Hooray for sociability! To my surprise, I managed to stay until the end of the night, but once they started locking up, I headed off home.

Live Impact #3 @ La Scène Bastille

2009-04-03T17:35:00.001+02:00

I slept in this morning and then forced myself out of bed to hit the neighborhood market for some roast chicken, which served as both my lunch and dinner. I had a pile of fellowship applications to finish and submit, so I dedicated myself to that for a large part of the day, although I did allow myself a bit of distraction to break the monotony. I also managed to do a little bit of work on revising my first chapter, but it was very little more than inserting a paragraph here and correcting some grammar there.

Then, by 1h00 or so, it was time to head out. A couple of friends had organized an event at La Scène Bastille called “Live Impact,” which features only live sets all night. Two other friends had been booked to perform that night, 2 Buddies, alongside big-name Berlin DJ Guido Schneider, so I could hardly miss the event. I had been feeling sore all week from my spectacular bike accident last weekend, but I sucked it up and told myself that a few drinks would make dancing a lot easier.

Live Impact #3 @ La Scène Bastille

The streets around rue de la roquette were no longer closed for construction, so I was able to bike my way through to La Scène without having to go all the way around place de la Bastille itself (which is never much fun at night). I wasn’t on the list or anything, but I managed to nonetheless get a warm greeting from the doorwoman, who recognized me from all the previous events I’ve been to (the majority of which I’ve been on the guestlist). As usual, I was braced to argue with the bouncer about keeping my bag, but I didn’t have any trouble this time.

0h00-2h00: NewBorn

The opening set was delivered by the duo of NathanH and GuiGui, both of whom were also the organizers for the soirée itself. Their sound tends to be a harder style of techno than I usually follow, with rather heavy influences from the “electro” sound that tend to make it a bit too noisy for my tastes. Tonight’s set, however, was much closer to the kind of techno I like; while not quite “minimal” per se, the sound was less busy and more focused, giving the whole thing a lighter, more spacious feel. Also, their pacing of build-ups and breakdowns was much slower than usual, which made the set feel less frenetic.

Although it was still relatively early in the night (1h30), the room was barely ¼ full, which was certain to make the promoters nervous. Throughout most of the night, they wouldn’t get over 50% capacity (by my estimation), and a large percentage of the crowd were friends of the promoters, showing up in support. This was pretty disappointing, considering that Guido Schneider should be able to fill a room pretty much in any large city, but this was mostly explained by the fact that there were two other big nights going on tonight, including the OpenHouse party at Bataclan, and the Panik party at l’Elysée Montmartre. Both events are long-standing events that have dedicated followings, so most likely a lot of potential attendees had been drawn away by the competition. Win some, lose some. On the upside, I was able to dance comfortably all night without being trampled on.

2h00-3h30: 2 Buddies

(note: I don’t remember the playlist-times precisely, so these sets may have been a bit longer or shorter)

I was impressed with their ability to give a large-scale contour to a live set, which often tends toward deconstructed amorphousness, but the imposition of that shape made the beginning of their set difficult to get into. Following off of New Born’s rather energetic/hard set, the began with a very low-intensity sound, in which even the bass kicks felt muted. The texture was certainly very sparse and minimal (as was most of their set), but it lacked the sort of energy and focus that excellent minimal techno/house can have. By about 30 minutes into the set, the sound become more intense and driving, with a greater emphasis on punchy bass kicks and judicious use of dubby vocal fragments to provide some linearity among all of the circular loops. The level of intensity continued to mount until the end of the set, when it finally felt like they were using the complete range of the sound system. Their beats had a tactile force to them, the mid- and hi-frequency elements were intricately woven without being too busy, and the whole ensemble had a forward-driving feel, a velocity that had the crowd really excited.

3h30-5h00: Guido Schneider

Although 2 Buddies’ set ended with a lot of energy and intensity, there was still a dramatic contrast with the beginning of Schneider’s set, which immediately began with the typical Berlin minimal sound. The bass kicks were punchy and resonant at the same time, being pitched very low to give them a room-filing quality. They also tended to be rather mobile, tracing patterns that were more complex than 4/4 and often having slight melodic contours. On top of this were very sparse mid- and hi-freq elements, which were generally simple in their arrangement, but sonically complex (i.e., the samples themselves were very richly-textured). There was a lot less structure and shape to the set than the one that came before, but Schneider managed to fill the room with that Berlin sound: both massive and tightly focused. I was actually surprised; when I had seen him last summer at Tresor, the set was far too hard and heavy-handed, and when I saw him at Bar25 at the end of the summer, it was lovely but very light (appropriate for a Sunday afternoon).

5h00-close: Bruno B

Well, I’ll admit that I wasn’t hugely thrilled with Bruno’s set, but I think there’s just a simple difference of aesthetics. He was clearly punching out a good electro-tinged set that dipped into harder techno and even trance, but that’s rarely what I like, so I found myself disconnecting from the set and losing interest. I eventually said goodbye to everyone and headed back home, feeling more than a bit sore from a night of dancing.

Ironically, I have very few amusing and/or scandalous stories from tonight. I had a great time and really enjoyed everyone’s sets, but nothing extraordinary happened; I usually have at least one intense conversation with somebody or I witness some interesting scene of human drama, but nothing of the sort tonight. Considering my misfortunes last weekend, though, perhaps I should be thankful.

Oops!

2009-04-02T15:31:00.000+02:00

Huh. Apparently I’ve been lax on my blogging lately. I totally thought I had posted something for today, but, alas, no. Well, nothing particularly exciting happened today, aside from roasting a big sea bass in the oven and feasting on fish, so I’ve got little to report. Oh, right: I spent the majority of the evening plugging away at some dissertation fellowship applications. Fun!

Of Teaching and Scrambling for Academic Funding

2009-04-01T12:18:00.000+02:00

I’m back! Monday and Tuesday were really busy with the beginning of the spring quarter and the arrival of new students, but that was actually a good thing; it kept my mind off of my less-than-excellent weekend.

Today, I got a good bit of news from U of C: I got a teaching fellowship! At first I was under the impression that it was the Tave fellowship that I won, since that was what I had applied for (this pays you to teach a course of your own design). But then the email I got said that I could list this as a “Whiting Teaching Fellowship” in my CV, which was confusing, seeing as the Whiting fellowship is something substantially different (tuition + a large stipend for 1 year). After an exchange of a couple of emails, I figured out that it was a teaching fellowship in the same format as a Tave fellowship, but with funding coming from the Whiting family endowment.

Either way, I’ll be teaching a course called “Nightlives: Music and Nighttime” next year. Yay!

However, it’s not quite that simple. Next year will be my first year out of the funding package that brought me to UofC in the first place. I’ll still have a tuition waiver for the next year, but I need to find money to pay for rent, food, and other living expenses, and the teaching fellowship only pays $5,000. I’ve got two other applications in the works (well, I have many more, but these are the two where I have some chance). One is a dissertation-writing fellowship where I get a reasonable amount of money BUT I can’t take any jobs, including teaching gigs (i.e., I’d have to give up the teaching fellowship). The other is a job as a preceptor (editor / mentor / tutor) for the MAPH program (a general humanities MA program), which pays very well ($22K!), but also involves a lot of work-hours, so I’m less likely to finish my dissertation by Spring 2010 in that case.

So I’ve got that coming down the pipe, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there (how’s that for mixed metaphors?).

In other news, I made daurade rose (red sea bream) today, which has to be one of the most expensive fishes by weight that I’ve ever bought, but it was certainly tasty. The daurade rose is described as having a very delicate flavor and buttery texture. I agree with the first part; “delicate flavor” is often used as an euphemism for “tasteless” or “not stinky,” but in this case the fish did have a delicate flavor that was slightly buttery and salty. For the texture, however, I found that the flesh was far too soft. It wasn’t as bad as that vieille I had the week before, but nonetheless it was seriously lacking in firmness.

Nor do I like this very much, thank you

2009-03-29T21:34:00.000+02:00

So I woke up this morning hoping that I would have a better day than yesterday, and here’s where that got me:

On the way over to the pub where I was when I lost track of my phone, my bike slips on a recently-washed curb and I manage an action-film-style fall, where I’m sent flying over the handlebars and rolling to a stop on a cobble-stone street (yes, cobblestones).
I do this in my nice leather jacket, which I still haven’t worked up the courage to inspect closely for damage.
I only discover at the end of the day that I had rolled in dog shit, and it had dried onto the cuff of my jeans in the course of the day.
The pub didn’t even have my phone, and the girl there made a half-hearted attempt at pretending to care enough to contact me if she did find it.

On the upside, I made a lovely sort of refried beans with urad dal, hot peppers, lardons, onions, garlic, coriander, fennel, mustard seeds, and unfiltered olive oil.

I do not like this, sam I am

2009-03-28T21:26:00.001+01:00

So this was an all-around shitty day, although I had the pleasure of seeing Janine, a friend from Berlin, for her birthday—the one ray of fun in the whole evening.

I started out the day by waking up later than I had wanted and feeling sluggish. I tried to get some work done, but my brain just didn’t want to kick in. I had very little to eat at my place, and so I ended up walking to the Alimentation Générale across the street and buying junk food, which had the unsurprising effect of making me more sluggish. All in all, I didn’t get much done.

Then I went out to see Janine for her birthday at an “English”-style pub near Etienne-Marcel, stopping by Le Pin Up to say hi to Fantômette as she kicked this latest edition of her monthly residency. Drinks with Janine were great, although I spent less time talking to the birthday girl herself (who was obviously in demand) and more time talking with a friend of hers from Lille, who was really sweet.

Near closing time at the pub (2h00), we settled up the bill only to find that there were three unclaimed pints. We did the math and figured out that it was probably a couple that had left much earlier, which didn’t leave Janine very happy, as she ended up covering the remaining pints.

From there, we headed over to Le Pin Up, where things started going downhill. While Janine was upstairs getting shots, I ordered a round of “Bubble Le Pin Up” drinks, which were a mixture of vodka, champagne, tons of ice (too much, in my opinon) and flavoured syrup. I ordered them with violet syrup, which is sort of the trademark drink of Le Pin Up, but when the drinks were poured, the drinks had a pink hue rather than a lavender one.

I asked the server if he had put the right syrup in the drinks, and he got very defensive and snippy. I tasted one and said that it tasted like raspberry, and got more aggressive and snarky, insisting that he hadn’t made an error, taking out the bottle of violet syrup and waving it in front of my face, and implying that I was too drunk to tell the difference.

Janine was here trying to celebrate her birthday and Fantômette was concentrating on her DJ so I decided to do the very French shoulder-shrug “whatever” gesture and not complain about it to either of the girls. Nonetheless, I’ll have to tell Fantô about it sooner or later, because I’m not paying 12€ per glass for shitty service in a painted-over root cellar. There are plenty of places in Paris for me to pay 100% too much for watered-down drinks, and many of them employ servers that are at least civil. Thus begins the LuisInParis boycott of Le Pin Up.

I had to make it over to On Cherche Encore… before the end of the night to say hellp to PanPan and Aclank, since the former was celebrating his birthday, but that I was held up by the fact that I discovered my cell phone to be missing. I searched everywhere around where I had put my belongings, and I didn’t see it anywhere. I distinctly remembered pulling out the phone to check the time at the pub around midnight, so the only other place it could be was the pub. Janine (bless her soul) walked over with me to the pub and helped me knock on the window, where we were able to get the attention of the staff as they were closing up shop. They insisted that they couldn’t find the phone anywhere, so I had to continue with my night with possibility of me having lost my phone (and all of my contact information with it).

I biked over to On Cherche Encore at top speed, but when I got there it was already the end of the night and both DJs had stopped spinning. I tried to ask if they were still serving drinks at the bar—I could really use one at this point—but the guy at the bar was apparently the second asshole bartender of the night, brushing me off dismissively before I could even say anything.

Again, I chose to pretend that I was in a good mood while I made small talk with my friends and bade them goodbye (and I was certainly happy to see them, so I didn’t want to give them any other impression), but I soon found the performance tiring and headed home, hoping tomorrow would be a fresh start.

Fantômette's B-day (part 2) at L'Hotel des Sens

2009-03-27T10:55:00.000+01:00

After sleeping in a bit in preparation for a big night out, I headed to the market to buy a roast chicken (which has now become my fortnightly treat to myself) and then proceeded to feel very, very full. I barely ate anything else for the rest of the day.

I took care of some administrative stuff and also did some work on the revision of chapter two, but I also wasted a large part of my day trying to get my internet connection working again. It seemed to be a server-side issue, so all of my attempts were really for naught. The thing just came back online spontaneously.

Later in the evening, I headed over to a friend’s place near Châtelet, where they were hosting a little apéro in preparation for our night out. I met a few new people, got to talk to a few other friends, and had a surprisingly in-depth conversation with one friend about the music of Steve Reich.

I also had an interesting conversation with one friend about “party friends.” Arguing against the notion that “you don’t make real friends in nightclubs,” he told me about how he met his current close friends, all of whom he got to know at nightclubs and many of which were perfect strangers that he spontaneously engaged in conversation. I’m going to have to corner him for an interview one of these days…

So…… Hoooooo @ L’Hôtel des Sens

OK, I’ll admit that the name of the event doesn’t translate well into English, but you’ll have to trust me when I say that it was a big hit. This was apparently the last “regular” night at this location, which is returning to its usual function as a swinger’s club.

The evening itself was pretty much a non-stop series of intense conversations with friends and strangers (plus a fair bit of drinking), so I’m not going to recount everything. Nonetheless, here are the highlights.

I had a long conversation with a girl that I used to see in the techno scene back in 2006-07, but who was pretty absent from this scene this past year. I remembered her as being adorable, effusive, tactile, and talkative—all of which was still true. She was still really interested in my dissertation project, we talked about that a length, as well as more mundane topics like how much she hated her current job, the difficulties of relationships between people of different ages, and so on.

Right as we were finishing a conversation on tactility and touching norms in nightclubs, Julie Dragon appears in front of us. She was apparently going to do a burlesque / striptease / fire-eating act in a few minutes, so she was walking around the floor, throwing fake rose petals while wearing 3-inch stilettos and a bright read leather corset. My friend gave her a playful pinch on the butt, and Ms. Dragon did not like that one bit. She turned around, still smiling, and proceeded to rip my friend a new one for touching her. My friend apologized, saying, “Look, I thought you were a guy [i.e., drag queen], and they generally react differently to that sort of thing.”

That explanation didn’t go over well, either, but she (my friend) had a point. She had a set of assumptions about what sorts of touch were welcome, permitted, or at least tolerated, based on the nightclub context, the composition of the crowd, and the gender-expression of the person in front of her, while Julie Dragon had her own set of assumptions and expectations that were influenced by the fact that she saw this setting as her workplace. Both of them saw their expectations put into question in this interaction, although Julie Dragon had the institutional weight of the club (as an employee for the evening) on her side.

What was also interesting (and unfortunate) was how this totally deflated my friend. She was angry, hurt, embarrassed, confused, exasperated, several other things, but mostly there was a feeling of disappointment that the tenuous and vaguely-defined interpersonal links that hold a crowd together had evaporated so quickly.

A couple of hours later, I was dancing downstairs and this guy approaches me and says, “Hey, I know you! We’ve met before somewhere…” It took me a few minutes, and then I recognized him as the boy from Toulouse that I met at Batofar nearly six months ago (not the one I made out with, but the one that constantly appeared to be getting it on with his friend). I managed to remember his name, his occupation, and even where he was from, which seemed to impress him. I told him about how the night that we had met at Batofar had become an important ethnographic anecdote for my research, which he found pretty amusing.

As some random girl started rubbing up against him and he got nervous (he has a girlfriend at the moment), we talked about male-male tactility again. He pointed out that he and his male friends would get frisky with each other precisely because there wasn’t the (perceived) danger of cheating on your girlfriend, having an unwelcome advance turn into accusations of sexual aggression, or even have casual flirtation be mistaken for a promise of sex. “On se chauffe, et c’est tout” he said (“We get each other hot, and that’s it.”), claiming that these homosocial/erotic/sexual/whatever interactions allowed him to have fun and experience certain kinds of sensual pleasure while avoiding the risks associated with heterosexual courtship. Of course, there’s the risk of being mistaken for homosexual, having his tactility be read as desire (probably why this happens mostly between friends), or even letting the playful eroticism spill over into a more sincere homosexual encounter (Boys Gone Wild!™), but those were risks that somehow seemed affordable to him and other Parisian boys like him—which marks a pretty big difference with most American/Canadian guys I see at clubs.

By 5h30, I was tired and ready to head home, but every time I did, one of my friends physically dragged me onto the dancefloor and stuck a drink in my hand. I did eventually manage to escape their attentions and get mysef on a bike back home, but boy was I wrecked.

Recipe: Arroz Chaufa

2009-03-26T15:13:00.000+01:00

Well, I’ve been promising a number of people a certain recipe, and it’s time to finally put it up here. I still intend on photoblogging this the same way I did my aji de gallina a couple of years ago, but that’s not happening right now, that’s for sure. Anyway, before starting the recipe a quick aside: in contrast to yesterday and the day before, I actually had good luck with fish, resulting in delicious roasted pink trout.

Arroz Chaufa (Peruvian-Cantonese Fried Rice)

Note: I’ve translated a few terms into French for my Francophone friends.

Also, you should start marinating the pork the night before if you can, as the pork takes on more flavor and becomes more tender if it has many hours to soak.

And also, chaufa (like other kinds of fried rice) reheats very well and is often believed to be even better the day afterwards, so this is a convenient recipe for potluck dinners and other events when you want to prepare the dish in advance.

Ingredients

1kg or so of pork shoulder roast (or some other lean boneless roast); you can also replace this with chicken, tofu, or seitan (gluten).
Brown sugar (cassonade) to taste (at least a 250g/ 1 cup)
Soy sauce to taste (I use 2 parts light soy to 1 part dark soy)
1 tablespoon of ginger, freshly grated
2-3 cloves of garlic, crushed
3 cups of rice, white and long-grain
2 bunches of green onions (also called spring onions)
6 eggs

Preparation

Trim off any excess fat or skin (which you can later fry in a pan to extract the lard and use in frijoles refritos) and cut the meat into strips about the length and width of two fingers. Try to cut across the grain of the meat for more tender pieces.
Place the in a large freezer bag (sac congélation) and add the ginger, garlic and sugar. Add the soy sauce(s) until the sugar has just barely dissolved. The marinade should be very sweet. If you’re wary of tasting a marinade with raw pork in it, you can prepare the marinade in another bowl and then add it to the pork afterwards.
Push out as much air as possible and seal the bag and place in the fridge. This must sit for at least two hours, but ideally you should start the marinade the night before preparing the dish.
On the day that you’re going to make the chaufa, begin by preparing the rice. Put 3 cups of dry rice into a large saucepan with 4.5 cups of water and a bit of salt, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer partially-covered until all the water has disappeared.
When the rice is ready, transfer it to a wide casserole or tray, separate the kernels with a fork, and leave it to cool and dry out a bit (this makes for better texture; if you like, you can make the rice the day before as well).
In a hot frying pan with a thin layer of oil, lay down the pieces of marinated pork in one layer until the pan is full, leaving some space between the pieces. After 3 or 4 minutes, turn over and continue cooking. After 4 minutes, pick the largest piece out of the pan and cut in the middle. The center should be white or light pink and firm.
Remove pieces from the pan and place any remaining uncooked pieces into the pan and fry in a similar manner.
Once all of the pieces have been cooked, pour the marinade into the pan and boil over high heat until it thickens into a light syrup (when the bubbles begin to pile up into a mousse). Remove from heat.
With a fork and a sharp knife, cut the pieces into small cubes and place into a large bowl. Pour the thickened marinade over the pork cubes and mix to coat.
Clean and trim the green onions, remove any wilted layers, and then slice thinly.
Finally, it is time to assemble the fried rice. Have a clean non-stick pan (a well-seasoned wok also works) and a heat-resistant spatula or wooden spoon. Around the stove, arrange the rice, meat, and green onions near you, with the necessary serving utensils. Place the eggs nearby, with a clean bowl and a fork for whipping the eggs as you work. Also, have the bottle of light soy sauce and frying oil open and within easy reach. And finally, have a large clean bowl ready for the finished rice.
The rice is prepared in batches, so you will repeat the next steps 6 times.
Heat the pan until it is very hot. Spray or pour just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan lightly, and then add 1/6 of the meat to the pan.
Reheat the meat, stirring constantly, for about 30 seconds and then add 1/6 of rice into the pan. Break up any clumps of rice and mix well.
As the rice cooks, crack one egg into the bowl and beat lightly with a fork.
Add 1/6 of green onions to the pan, 2 dashes of soy sauce, and mix quickly.
Create an empty space in the center of the pan, add a bit more oil, and pour the egg into the middle. Tilt the pan until the egg covers the center of the pan and runs into the rice at the edges.
When the egg begins to turn opaque and coagulate on top, push the rice back on top of the eggs and wait for 30 seconds. Then, break up the egg with the edge of your utensil and mix it into the rice.
Transfer to your serving bowl and repeat the previous 6 steps.
Serve and enjoy!

Fishy Failures, Part 2 (plus a concert)

2009-03-25T16:00:00.000+01:00

So, a continuation of my fish-related woes today.

While I was teaching at l’Ecole des Chartes in the evening, I got a call from a friend, who had an extra ticket to a show by Jamait a French musician in the chanson française tradition. But the show was starting at 20h00 and I wasn’t going to get out of class until 19h00, so I was in a big hurry to get home, eat something, and head out to the concert.

Thankfully, my friend decided to go to the concert after the intermission and told me to show up at 20h30 instead, so the prospect of me showing up on time became a bit more realistic. Nonetheless, I had to eat quickly. “Thank goodness I made that ceviche yesterday!” I thought. More than 24 hours later, the acidic lemon and lime juices should’ve properly pickled the shark and caused the flesh to become more firm.

Alas, alack, that wasn’t the case. If it’s possible to imagine, the pieces of shark had actually become both gelatinously-soft and inedibly-chewy. It was the weirdest sensation, like eating marshmallows and rubber at the same time.

Anyway, I had read online that shark flesh gets soft when it’s beginning to go bad, so I decided that I must’ve been sold bad shark and gave up on it. I won’t tell you how much money I lost on that kilo of shark meat. Grrr.

And so I made it to the concert venue, La Cigale, in time to meet my friend and catch the second half of the concert, although I was feeling pretty hungry through the whole thing.

The concert itself was interesting. The artist, Jamait, is a bit of an anachronism, performing a 1950’s-era musical style, dressed in Depression-era attire, with contemporary emo-pop, fist-clenching emotionalism. I found the overwrought performance style to be cringe-inducing, but his lyrics were sometimes quite good and occasionally clever. I was amused by one song, “OK, tu t’en vas,” all of which can be paraphrased as “OK, you’re leaving me. That’s bad and I’m sad. But on your way out, can you take out the trash?” On the other hand, I found the melodies to his songs overly formulaic; they all sounded very similar to each other in contour and rhythm, and they all resembled the canonic repertoire of French chanson too closely. It was like I had heard all of these songs before.

Besides all of that, Jamait’s band was excellent. They weren’t always playing styles that I enjoy, but I was really impressed with their technical skill. The bassist at one point pulled out a contrabass and provided an echo for the singer’s melancholy song, perfectly mimicking the sliding inflections of the singer’s voice.

After the concert, we were both deathly hungry and already in the Montmartre area, so we went to my favourite salad place, Le Relais Gascon, and had massive salads covered in fried garlic-potatoes. So delicious.

Fishy Failures, Part 1

2009-03-24T15:11:00.000+01:00

Since the spring quarter students still haven’t arrived, I took advantage of the low traffic to work from home. Yay!

I headed off to my neighborhood market to buy my provisions for the day. At one fishmonger, I found shark meat, which got me all excited. Although ceviche, considered a national dish in Peru, is usually made from corvina (a type of sea bass), ceviche de tollo (shark ceviche) is a particular specialty of the capital city, Lima. I’ve only had proper shark ceviche a few times in my life—every time thanks to my mom finding some at her local fish market—but I’ve always adored it. When it’s properly made, it’s firm and a bit chewy, but full of flavour.

So imagine my confusion when I got home and opened my very expensive package of shark steaks and found that the meat was all floppy and soft. The shark skin had the usual sandpaper-like texture and underneath the skin was a thick layer of cartilage, but the muscles inside were so soft and squishy that they were nearly gelatinous. Cutting it up was like trying to handle half-set Jell-O™. Nonetheless, I finished making the ceviche marinade and threw it in the fridge, hoping that the acids would firm up the shark flesh. More on this tomorrow.

I also bought a fish called vieille (“old lady”; Ballan Wrasse in English), which interested me because it had pretty, brightly-coloured mottled patterns on it and yet it was only 3.50€ per kilo. I wondered what would make it so cheap. Was it full of bones? Too tough? Smelly?

That night, I roasted the fish on top of a bed of root vegetables and celery. As I was waiting for it to finish cooking, I looked up the fish on the web to find the English translation. In the process, I came upon a site that reported that some people found the flesh of ballan wrasses insipid. Hmm, that wasn’t a good sign, but I’m not one to shy away from seafood.

When I took the fish out of the oven and put the first forkful of flesh into my mouth, I immediately opened up my laptop and looked up the definition of the term “insipid.” While I had always taken “insipid” to mean something like “facile” or “stupid” or “simple,” it actually means “lacking in taste or character.” This is pretty much exactly the problem with this fish. The flesh is so soft when cooked that it doesn’t so much flake as disintegrate, it feels oily and pasty in the mouth, and it tastes like absolutely nothing. Seriously, this has less taste than unseasoned tofu. Even smearing it with gobs of super-hot French mustard didn’t do much to improve the taste. So, next time (if there is a next time), I might fillet the fish and marinate the fillets in something very, very flavourful and a bit acidic. Bleah.

You is my candy ho

2009-03-23T13:15:00.001+01:00

[If you've ever read Happy Noodle Boy, just replace "candy" with "elf" in the title to understand where this came from.]

After a relatively unexciting (but frustrating) day at work, I headed off to my favourite chocolate/candy shop in Paris, à l’Étoile d’Or by Denise Acabo. I’ve described this place before on this blog, so I’m not going to repeat my description of the store and it’s delightfully eccentric owner. Suffice it to say that I left with:

100%-cocoa Bernachon chocolate
Bernachon’s caramel-filled chocolate bar (Kalouga)
One of the last “Porcelana” bars from Chocolat Bonnat
A bar of Bonnat’s amazing 65% “half-dark” milk chocolate bars
Candied violet petals
Candied acacia petals
A stack of caramels from Monsieur Guénin (the softest and richest caramels I’ve ever had)

So, yeah. That’s how I roll when I go candy-shopping in Paris. And let’s not get started with the macarons.

The world's most un-halal curry

2009-03-22T13:04:00.000+01:00

So my plan today (after getting home at 10am this morning) was to relax for a bit, play some video games, and then make some awesome curry. I had gone to my neighborhood outdoor market on Friday to get some ground meat to make a ground-lamb or ground-chicken curry, but—this being France, after all—the only thing that the butchers had pre-ground was pork. Fine, I thought, pork is tasty, too.

The results were predictably delicious, if also unbelievably fatty. I’ll be eating bean curries and fish for the rest of the week to make up for this, no kidding. Thankfully, I hadn’t been eating all that much today, so this massive dose of pork still balanced out with my daily caloric intake.

Homo-something and Workshop Night @ Le Rex

2009-03-21T12:56:00.000+01:00

Well, I don’t know how it happened, but I managed to get very, very behind on blogging. So here begins the blog-plosion as I try to get back on track.

I decided to head into downtown and work on my dissertation in a café on one of the islands, but I had the craziest time finding an empty space at one of the Vélib stations. In the end, I had to park the bike at the Institut du Monde Arabe and walk all the way over to Notre-Dame from there. Anyway, I sat down in this café just next to the cathedral, which my Dad and I had visited back when he was in town for Christmas. The place was pleasant enough and I managed to spend a good 2 hours without being bothered (mind you, I made a point of coming between the lunch and dinner hours), but my cappuccino cost me €6.20, so maybe next time I’ll have a coffee in my neighborhood and forgo the ambience. Besides, the place was packed with tourists.

Fast-forward to tonight: I was at Le Rex for a night featuring Berlin-based minimal DJs on the Workshop label, including Move D live (OK, but a bit flat), and Lowtec and Even Tuell doing a back-to-back set (spotty performance, especially with regards to mixing/beatmatching). So I’ve got two amusing stories from tonight, both involving guys, gayness and intimacy (seriously, am I just a magnet for these things?):

Shortly after a few friends joined me on the dancefloor at around 3h30, I notice two relatively cute guys making out near me. Although people will describe the Rex’s crowd as mixed (sexually), in truth it’s still majority-heterosexual, even if gay-friendly, so same-sex necking is still something of a rare sight. Anyway, they both started making significant eye contact with me (which is generally quite sexually-charged in France), and one of them started dancing close to me, making even more conspicuous eye contact, and even managing to adjust his dancing style so that his hand would brush against my crotch from time to time. “Neat!” I thought, “Cute guys are hitting on me!” Even if it came to nothing, it’s always nice to see that someone finds you desirable. But then, one of my friends tapped my shoulder to talk to me and the other guy had disappeared. A few minutes later, he was hitting on some other guy; then, another guy; then another. As it turned out, it was just this one guy who was throwing himself at every male who returned his gaze. So I have sort of mixed feelings about the whole episode: on the one hand, it’s not much of an ego stroke to be hit on by some desperate horndog with no apparent standards, but on the other hand it’s reassuring that this guy could make advances on everything with a penis at this generally-hetero club and not get into trouble.

Right, so speaking of this generally-hetero thing, maybe “vaguely hetero” is a better term. Consider my second anecdote:

It’s nearly the end of the night (5h30) and I head up to the bar to buy a final round of drinks for me and my friends. My bank card doesn’t seem to work at the bar, so I end up having to use my last bit of cash to buy the drinks. This, as it turns out, would be my saving grace. A guy appears at the bar next to me, looking a bit dandy-ish with a white shirt and a white scarf tied around his neck (indoors, at 5h30 in the morning).

He taps my shoulder and says, “Tu me trouves bogosse?” “Bogosse” can mean “pretty boy” in a pejorative sense, but it’s also used in French banlieusard jargon to mean “hottie.” Either way, he was asking if I found him good-looking.

He was a bit too precious for my tastes, but he was certainly a pretty boy, so I said, “Yeah, sure.”

“So, buy me a drink.”

“Um, what?”

“If you think I’m hot, why don’t you buy me a drink.”

“Yeah, well look; I just spent my last dime on drinks for my friends, so you’re outta luck.”

“But wait, I must turn you on at least on a technical basis.”

“Uh, OK, I’m game. What do you mean?”

“I’m a faux-mo [he actually uses this term in the original French conversation. –lmgm]. You see, I’m hetero, but maybe I’m convertible.”

“Oh, I see where this is going.”

“So maybe I just need a drink, you know. I’ve already got the mannerisms…” and at this he makes a stylized clawing motion with one hand, as if he were doing an impression of Eartha Kitt.

“Um, yeah, I’m sorry but my drinks are ready and I’ve got to find my friends. Happy hunting.”

So there you go. The amusing thing about this episode was that this guy was engaging in the kind of economic trade of veiled sexual promises that is the (negative) stereotype of heterosexual courtship; i.e., complaints about “golddigging” and manipulation. But what’s also interesting is that, while this heterosexual narrative depends on the supposition that women don’t “naturally” want sex with men and require gifts/drinks/etc to be enticed, this guy was playing on a similar supposition regarding straight men and gay sex.

Surprise Birthday Parties and other fun things

2009-03-20T21:32:00.000+01:00

After getting up and heading off to the market to get some veggies and the fixings for an upcoming meat curry, I did something that I almost never do: played video games. Much like reading fiction, video games are sort of thing from which I derive great pleasure, but in which I don’t engage when I have work on the horizon (which is almost always, and most likely forever). I guess that, since there’s no direct relation to my productivity and it’s clearly fun, I see it as an indulgence that I should somehow restrict, in relation to the endless list of non-fiction books I could be reading or the dissertation I should be writing. Anyway, I fired up a version of Tropico 2 and amused myself for a good long while.

As I was playing, I also had a chicken soup slowly simmering away on the stove, and by the late afternoon the chicken bones had become pliable and hollow, so the soup was ready. I removed the solids and passed the whole thing through a sieve, and by the time everything was done, it was nearly 20h00 and it was time to head out.

The plan for tonight was to meet at a friend’s place for a surprise birthday party for Fantômette, who had her birthday earlier in the week. Everybody showed up early and got started drinking and eating (we weren’t going to wait for her, obviously) and, when Fantô finally arrived, we hid in the salon and surprised her with a raucous rendition of the happy birthday song (© some litigious old lady). From there, the evening descended into a lot of champagne and wine, somewhat foolishly rounded off with vodka once we had finished the wine. By the time we were done and heading out to continue our evening (2h30), we were all feeling pretty…um…happy.

We were five people in total, which was one too much for a regular taxi. In our state, we had some trouble figuring this out, but thankfully a patient taxi driver explained the mathematics to us. Once we found a second taxi, we were well on our way. All but one of us was heading to La Scène Bastille to check out the soirée Crocodile, which was apparently going to be an electro night featuring Matias Aguayo. I had been interested in seeing him spin, since I had met him last summer in Berlin, BUT, it turns out that I had confused him for Carlos Valdes (I know, I know; not even similar). So I ended up being rather disappointed by his set, which was pretty lackluster. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a big electro fan these days (if you had asked me in 2002 I might’ve had a different opinion), but even within the electro style, I found the set to lack coherence and energy (and, at times, even reasonable transitions between tracks). When he threw in a soca track on top of a distortion-heavy electro track, I lost patience and left.

Despite the disappointing music, though, I can at least say that the crowd had a pretty good feel to it. Everyone seemed to be having fun, there were enough people to fill the room without making it unbearable, and the crowd felt rather friendly. Nonetheless, that only goes so far in saving bad music, and eventually I decided to just go home and save my energies for the next night.

Strikes are like Gay Pride, minus the glitter.

2009-03-19T19:48:00.001+01:00

Well, seeing the length of yesterday’s impromptu blog-treatise, here’s my short observation for today:

France is on strike, again. I’ve come to the conclusion that strike marches in Paris are like gay pride marches—without the bears and twinks and glitter, but not without camp value.

Wherein the ethics of pedagogy are unexpectedly discussed

2009-03-18T19:19:00.000+01:00

So today I took a day off work, since this is technically spring break for the U of C kids, which means nobody is around at work right now. I slept in, ran some errands, walked around in the surpringly-warm and sunny weather, sketched out a new outline for the revisions to my first chapter, and prepared an elaborate dinner. It was awesome. Mind you, I did have to go over to l’Ecole des Chartes and teach, so that detracted a bit from my day.

Speaking of which, on the way home I saw this sticker on a doorjamb close to my place: “Un élève n’est pas un client” (A student isn’t a client). Something about that statement rings quite true. Having learned and taught in at least three different university systems now, I can definitely say that a lot of friction between teachers and students (and administrators) comes from the conflation of student/teacher and client/server relationships.

But it’s not immediately clear how these relationships are different, and at least some of this opacity comes arises from the exchange of capital. As soon as money changes hands—even if it’s between a student’s parents and the teacher’s university—this inaugurates a relationship that everyone in a consumer-capitalist society is familiar with: if I’ve just given you money, you owe me either goods or services. In some cases, the expected service is to transfer knowledge, in other cases, the expected good is a diploma. Regardless, the fact of payment by the student (or on his/her behalf) gives the sense that the learning and degree-recognition are now assured. In fact, you could say that students feel entitled to the grades, exam performance, and diplomas they have purchased.

Those who’ve worked at expensive private schools or universities are probably very familiar with the term “entitled.” And there’s a reason for that: the larger the tuition expenses, the stronger students and their parents will feel that they’ve purchased a service around which they can make demands and complaints in the same genre as those they would make to their domestic servants (who don’t get enough respect, either, but that’s another blogpost). In places where tuition is largely subsidized by the state, this seems to be much less of a problem; sure, their taxes go toward supporting the educational institutions, but at least the routing of the money through the state seems to make education feel like a civic or cultural responsibility, rather than a private good (and, in some countries, luxury item). Ironically, it is in the countries where education is most conceptualized as a right that the students are the least entitled in their relations with their institutions.

So what? If there’s a financial transaction going on, isn’t is just being realistic, pragmatic, and un-romantic to treat it as a purchase rather than enrollment or registration? Is the difference between teacher and housemaid just one of class pretensions? Well, here’s the thing: pedagogy isn’t the same as service. I’m not quite sure what it is, but it has some important differences.

The first major difference is that, unlike most services, pedagogy requires action and effort on the part of the person receiving it. If you’re paying me to clean your house, you don’t have to be involved in any way with the cleaning; I wouldn’t expect you to contribute to my efforts to clean, and—most importantly—I wouldn’t fail to do my job due to negligence on your part. In the context of pedagogy, however, the teacher provide the materials and the guidance for learning, but the student’s efforts are to some minimal degree indispensible to the success of the outcome.

Furthermore, the goal of pedagogy isn’t just to give something to the student, but to cause the student to change in some way. There’s an expectation that the student not only make the effort to learn, but to develop him/herself and become a somehow different person. In French, for example, the common term for “education” is “formation,” which makes the underlying metaphor of pedagogy clearer: the goal is to shape the student into a particular form. And so, the demand of pedagogy on the student is not only to try, but to progress; this is why the protestation, “But I tried so hard!” cannot earn extra marks.

In this sense, the pedagogical relationship is a lot closer to the therapeutic relationship of therapists, fitness coaches, physiotherapists and doctors: you pay to submit to transformative practice that you hope will make you better in some way. And, much like in these other relationships, the teacher-student relationship is one where the relations of dominance and control are ambivalent at best. It’s one of the few relationships where you pay to obey.

Which is, perhaps, why these relationships are a lot less tense in contexts where the student/patient/athlete hasn’t paid directly for the pedagogy. But even in the context of completely free, subsidized education, there needs to be some way to articulate the responsibilities, rights, and powers of teachers and students (and administrators, too).

Weekend post-mortem, 1

2009-03-16T21:44:00.001+01:00

Phew! Paper (or at least the draft required) is done. It was a pretty intense weekend of work, but I did manage to have a bit of fun as well. On Friday night, I rewarded a solid day of writing by going to the Akufen-Cabanne [LINK] back-to-back all-night-long mega-set at La Scène Bastille. It was actually a bit disappointing, although there were some high points to the set. What was memorable to the evening, however, was when a bouncer caught a girl trying to light up a joint on the dancefloor (not a good idea now that there’s no smoking in clubs). She was obviously already a big drunk/high, and her reaction to him grabbing her arm was to flail frantically, sending other people’s drinks crashing to the floor, and yell loudly, “Let me go! Let me go!!” What you didn’t hear unless you were standing closer to her was an additional phrase just as the bouncer finally secured both her arms: “I’ll suck you off.”

Really?? Does that work? And—to be ruthlessly pragmatic—if it might work, how likely is it now that you’ve started the negotiations in public?

The scene elicits a whole series of conflicting reactions in me. At first, incredulous laughter. It’s not like there’s no precedent for people trading sexual favours for other kinds of favours, but the business is usually conducted in the more indirect registers of flirting, innuendo, and knowing glances. At the same time, there’s something profoundly saddening about the fact that, as this woman saw the rest of her night evaporating before her, she reached for this as her next resort. But not her last resort. That’s what’s saddening: whatever her logic, she came to the conclusion that offering her mouth to the bouncer’s cock (and presumably his subsequent jizz) was the best of available options at that moment. And, like most bouncers in Paris, her interlocutor was black, and the intersection of racial sexual stereotypes and this (white) woman’s decision to offer sex as a bribe made the whole situation all the more fucked up.

So there ya go, my odd moment from the weekend. I’ve got another story from Sunday night, but I’ll save that for tomorrow’s post.

Coco Feel and Love Shonk by Shonky

2009-03-15T12:38:00.003+01:00

Continuing yesterday's post on the top 50 charted tracks for February (on Resident Advisor), I noticed that Paris-based Shonky's recent release on the Contexterrior label was listed at about halfway on the list. The track that was listed from the release was the title track, "Coco Feel and Love Shonk," which I find to be the weaker track on the release; it comes out as somewhat clichéd, overdone house. However, the second track on the release, "Donkey Kong," is way better. It has a certain old-school, Aux88, thumpy feel to it that I quite like.

Alas, I couldn't find a YouTube clip with the Donkey Kong track, so here's "Coco Feel and Shonk Love" for now, and you can click here to go to Beatport and hear an excerpt of "Donkey Kong."

You Have To Dance by Nôze, remixed by Mathias Kaden and Lee Jones

2009-03-14T12:23:00.000+01:00

Apparently, the Mathias Kaden remix of Nôze's "You Have to Dance" is the top-charted track for February on Resident Advisor; that is, of all the DJ charts posted in February on that site, this track was charted the most. Although the original track isn't quite dancefloor dynamite, the Mathias Kaden remix is certainly golden. Also on the release are an acapella version also by Mathias Kaden that could be useful for bridging between two other tracks, and a more dubby and downtempo remix by Lee Jones. Here's the whole release from Beatport, so that you can hear a bit from each one. The track was released on Get Physical Music, which was also the top-charted label for February.

Lattice by Marcel Dettman

2009-03-13T12:00:00.001+01:00

There was a feature on Marcel Dettman on Resident Advisor which is well worth reading. Not only does it give some insight into how he structures his 8+-hour closing sets at Berghain, it also provides some great photos of the interior of Berghain itself, which is usually a completely camera-free zone.

So here's a track called Lattice (Beatport link) from a release he put out on his own record label, Marcel Dettman Records (natch). I thought this would be a good one to post because it almost perfectly encapsulates the sound of the Berghain room, as opposed to the Panorama Bar room. So when you read my posts and you see phrases like "the techno was a bit too hard and pounding, better suited for the Berghain room," you'll know what I mean. I don't dislike this track, but it's the sort of thing that I tire of relatively quickly. A lot of the tracks I've posted in the past couple of days, on the other hand, would be PanoramaBar material.

Bingo Bongo by Paul Kalkbrenner

2009-03-12T11:48:00.001+01:00

So Paul Kalkbrenner has been getting a lot of mainstream attention recently as the star of the film Berlin Calling..., a film about a Berlin DJ who finds himself overwhelmed by the the Berlin techno scene. I haven't seen it yet, as it's mostly doing just the film festival circuit at the moment, but I'm hoping to catch it soon. In the meanwhile, he's released the soundtrack for the album, which was pretty much entirely produced by him. Instead of giving you a track from the soundtrack (which I'm still trying to decide if I really like), here's a release of his from earlier in 2008.

The track is called Bingo Bongo, and it was released on an EP of the same name on the record label Bpitchcontrol last april (click here to see the release at Beatport). I like this track for it's dense but light use of accoustic drum samples, most of which sit at the middle-ground of the mix and don't overwhelm the sound. I like that he's managed to place the different samples in different places in the stereo field (i.e., pan right/left), without losing the feeling that there's a spatial centre to the whole thing. The track takes some time to build, but there's a nice breakdown at around 3:00, followed by a great return of the bass at 3:49. Good stuff.

Afefe Iku - Mirror Dance

2009-03-11T11:48:00.002+01:00

OK, this track has been around since early 2008 and anybody that has been going to minimal parties in the past year will tell you that this track has been played to death, but I can't deny the catchiness of the xylophone patterns in this track (they start around 0:50). I had spent the entire year hearing that track, wondering who it was, asking someone nearby, and then either mis-hearing their response or getting bad information. And then today, as I was perusing the reviews on Resident Advisor, I fell across a review of a re-release of tracks on the Secretsundaze label, which included this track. Yay! Finally, I know who this is.

So Afefe Iku is apparently the protégé of Osunlade, a composer, recording artist and DJ that hails from the US but seems to have artistic and spiritual ties to Africa (in particular, he's a priest in the Yoruba religion of Ifa, according to his Wikipedia site). He founded and now runs a house label called Yoruba Records, which has been known for "soulful" house, but has also recently taken a "world music" turn, which presumably includes Afefe Iku's work. Afefe Iku himself hails from the island of Manda near the Kenyan coast.

I'm not sure what the musical traditions are on Manda, but certainly the presence of wooden ideophones (i.e., xylophones) on this track is a strong signifier of African-ness. You can find pitched hammered-wood instruments of all sorts in Sub-saharan Africa, especially in the west and the central regions. Kenya being on the eastern coast, though, I'm not as certain that this reflects his own local musical traditions. Then again, he could be making a more pan-African gesture with this track or he may not have any intention of referencing African music in the first place (although the fact that he's being mentored by Osunlade and he's on Yoruba Records makes this more likely).

UPDATE: According to a tip from my composer-friend Shawn, you should replace the word "xylophone" above with "marimba." I can never tell those two apart.

Radio Silence for a few days

2009-03-10T11:09:00.000+01:00

Well, I have a draft of a paper (which will eventually become Chapter 3) due this Sunday and I have little more than a few sketches to show for it. So I'll be quiet on the blog front for the next few days. I still owe a friend my arroz chaufa recipe (finally!), so I might take a moment to post that, and there's an exciting Akufen / Cabanne back-to-back party coming up this Friday, so I might post a few things about that as well. Anyway, enjoy the quiet! I might replicate what I did last November by putting up favourite tracks of mine. In fact, here's the remixes of "O Superman" (original by Laurie Anderson) that I mentioned in last weekend's post. The third one ("Reboot 20 Cubans mix") is the one Monika Kruse played.

The Solemn March Home

2009-03-09T23:58:00.001+01:00

Well, thanks to the fact that I actually got to bed at a “decent” hour last night (despite the lack of sleep the night before), I popped out of bed at about 10h00 this morning. I spent a bit of time preparing my blog notes and putting my stuff together in preparation for my flight this evening, and then got a message from Fantômette, saying that she was going out for breakfast. I headed out to join her, although a took a detour at a couple of stores on the way over. The night before, I had washed my new jeans in Florian’s washing machine, and the vibration from the spin cycle sent one of his glasses crashing into the kitchen sink. Thankfully, I managed to secure the rest of his kitchenware before there was any more damage, but I still felt bad about the glass. So off I went today to pick up a kitschy and set of replacements. Florian reads this blog, so I’m not going to tell you what I got him. It’s a surprise!

Anyway, Fantômette had some trouble finding the original breakfast spot she had wanted to go to in Kreuzberg, but she eventually ended up in a little lunch nook on Schlesisches Straße, near where the Watergate club is located. The food was decent, although my lunch item took ages to prepare. I had a baguette smeared with chives and cheese, but I could tell that the baguette had been pulled out of the freezer and cooked at the last minute. I mean, there are bakeries all over the place here. You can’t just walk down the street and buy a baguette or something similar?

Anyway, after our meal I left Fantômette to wander Kreuzberg and I headed back to Florian’s place to clean up, do the dishes, pack my bags and head out. We had a date with Janine for a coffee after her work and before our flight (Fantômette was on the same flight as I). The coffee was great and it was wonderful to spend a bit more time with Janine (who complained that I didn’t spend enough time with her on Sunday), but we took a bit too long to get back from the café and we nearly missed our train to the airport. Thankfully, Janine managed to sweet-talk our way to the front of the line at the Deutsche-Bahn ticket office.

The check-in desks for EasyJet at the airport were a mess (again), but we eventually got checked in and headed down to our gate. The trip back was uneventful, although we were both feeling pretty groggy after the athletic weekend we had just lived through.

The Two-Day, Four-Party Marathon

2009-03-07T21:06:00.000+01:00

Daytime

Well, considering that I had gotten home at 10h00 this morning, you’ll forgive me if I got up at 16h00. That’s just six hours of sleep, so it’s not really “sleeping in,” per se. Anyway, the rest of the “daytime” portion of my day was unexceptional. I fixed myself some eggs and tea, took care of some correspondence, and then started to catch up on my blog posts. Three hours later, it was already time for me to make my way out for the beginning of the night…a night that would last until tomorrow night, I might add.

Apéros

My friend Janine (French gal living in Berlin) had invited me, Fantô + her crew, Bob & Donna + their Franco-Berliner friend and a few other people over to her place for an “apéro” (i.e., drinks and snacks) at around 21h00. But first, Fantômette had invited me to the apartment, where she was staying with her girlfriend and another friend of ours, for a few drinks there. So I headed over to this massive industrial Hof (warehouse) on Ritterstraße in Kreuzberg (near the Moritzplatz U-Bahn station, U-8) to find them. Apparently, some smart person had bought the whole top floor of the building on one side and turned it into a suite of studio apartments to be rented like hotel suites. It was kind of brilliant, really. It’s exactly what a tourist would want of Berlin: an über-modern apartment in a red-brick warehouse in a shabby-but-up-and-coming neighborhood.

Anyway, we hung out there for a while, had some drinks, retold stories of parties past and filled each other in on the details of the night before (we had parted ways at Golden Gate). By about 21h00, we started walking our way over to Janine’s place. It took us a bit of time to find the right street, but eventually we got there and met up with the rest of the crew. Bob & Donna were there along with their Franco-Berliner friend (let’s call him Foster), a German girl who was a close friends of Janine, two British guys that Janine knew, a woman from North Carolina that lives in Berlin now, and the girls whose birthday it was the last time I was in town and I hung out with Janine.

Janine’s “apéro” spread was actually close to a full dinner made of finger-foods, including piles of crackers, dips, olives cheeses and so on. After a while, she emerged with pieces of cheese and salmon-spinach quiches, and later she materialized with cake and ice cream. And all the time, of course, she was plying us with wine and/or liquor. I managed to restrain myself from overeating, since I’ve learned from experience that eating just before a big night out tends to weigh me down and sap my energy.

I had a great time hanging out and talking to the folks at the party, although I’ll admit that I ended up speaking almost exclusively with the two british guys and the American girl, since they were the only people I hadn’t met before. I can’t remember all of the conversation, but I do recall that I gave the most lucid summary of my dissertation project so far; now if only I could remember what I said…

12h30: The False Start

At around 12h30, we began moving. Janine’s German girlfriend was going to Arena club to see a friend, Foster was heading to bed to meet us later at Berghain, everyone else was going to check out the “Champagnerama” party going on at the old Kindl brewery, and I was going to meet a friend from the Chicago scene at Kinski’s (and then meeting up with the rest of the crew at the Kindl brewery).

I headed over to Kinski’s, which was only two blocks away from Janine’s place, but I didn’t see my friend. I gave her a call to see if she was still coming, but I didn’t get an answer. Kinski’s is a sort of art space / café / club / whatever, and it’s pretty small and the crowd seems to all know each other. So it was a bit awkward for me to walk into this small, socially-connected space, walk around and conspicuously look for someone who’s not there, and then leave. Anyway, I wrote off that part of the night and headed off to meet the rest of the crew.

Just as I’m getting to the U-Bahn station, I get a call from Donna saying that the lineup is 200m long and looks to be about 3 hours of wait. It’s fucking cold, so they decide to head to Maria am Ostbahnhof instead. Janine, meanwhile, decides to head home and sleep instead, with the promise of joining us later at Berghain. And so I hop on the U-Bahn and head towards our new destination.

1h30: Spreepiraten @ Maria am Ostbahnhof

After a rather long and cold walk from the Jannowitzbrücke U-Bahn station to the club, wait in line for about 20 minutes and then pay the excessive cover (12€) to get in. 12€ for Berghain? Sure. For Maria am Ostbahnhof? Well, it better be on par with Berghain…

OK, so the club wasn’t as magical as the Berghain/PanoramaBar complex, but it was still a pretty cool club. Before the emergence of OstGut (which would eventually become Berghain) and Watergate, Maria am Ostbahnhof was apparently the central spot in Berlin for techno connoisseurs. The music programming had gone in an odd direction by the time I got to Berlin this past summer, with mostly electro-rock events and b-list local DJs, so I was never really tempted to visit the place. So it was high time I check this place out.

The space itself is pretty nice, especially in the back room, which has a pattern of diagonal cubes stuck to the wall behind the DJ in a way that casts really lovely shadows but also absorbs some of the sound and prevents slap-echoes. All around the club, they made good use of light projections to give the interior a unified theme; the theme for tonight: black-and-white silhouettes of unmarked playing cards.

The sound system itself was pretty good, especially in the main room. From the side near the main bar, the sound was loud but not uncomfortable. From the center of the dancefloor, the sound was impressively strong but not overwhelming. In the second room, on the other hand, the treble tended to be a bit too shrill. Thank goodness for earplugs!

The crowd was pretty mixed, mostly a combination of the late-twenties/thirties crowd that you see at Berghain & Watergate along with a late-teen / early-twenties crowd that seemed more like “casual partygoers” than avid fans of a particular DJ or scene. Of course, I’m generalizing here; when I was 17 and raving in Ontario, I already had pretty specific tastes; but nonetheless I had the feeling that the younger folks in the crowd were there to party first and see a specific DJ second, while the older folks acted more like they were attending a concert of a particular artist. Interestingly enough, at Berghain the crowd is almost entirely late-twenties and older, and yet you can still play this same game of “why did you come here tonight?” with the crowd: some are there for a particular DJ, some are there because it’s Berghain and they couldn’t imagine going anywhere else, and some are there because they want to party and this is the place to do it with a great deal of intensity.

Anyway, I wasn’t there for very long, but I caught the opening set by Larsson, which was pretty solid, and the first half of Alexander Kowalski’s live set, which was pretty strong and made great use of melodic fragments to suture his live set together.

So by 3h30 Bob and Donna have headed off to sleep and get ready for Berghain later that morning, while Fantômette and her crew disappear at around the same time. Another friend of mine (a close friend of a roommate from last summer) was going out with her crew to that party at the Kindl brewery later in the morning and I was determined to finally see her (after several near-misses since last summer), so I stayed at Maria for a couple more hours.

”Nice Guy!”:On the dancefloor, I run into a guy on the dancefloor who seems to be having a great time. At a particular high-point of the music, we both start pumping our fists in the air and then make eye contact. From there he offers me his beer and we exchange some brief remarks on the music. I tell him I’m from Canada and he says he’s from Rostock, in the north of Germany. He’s clearly high as a kite on a 200km lead, as his face is making pronounced contortions that I would associate with some very strong, “mashy” ecstasy.

I go away and come back a few minutes later and he appears next to me again. He offers me more of his beer, and then we dance some more and share more of those wordless glances that both check to see if the other person is in the same affective place as you are, and also prompt the other person to somehow respond. The current title of my dissertation starts with “Can You Feel It, Too?”, and this is sort of the look and the encounter that I’m thinking of when I quote that phrase; these are glances that ask questions but also answer them: “Did you just hear that?” “Yes I did!” “Isn’t this amazing?” “It sure is!” “Are you feeling this right now?” “Totally!”

Anyway, the crowd is packed and we’re being squeezed, but suddenly he sees a pocket of space in the crowd and gestures for me to follow him and dance next to him. When I reach him, he smiles and puts an arm around my shoulders as I put an arm around his waist, and we dance like that for a while.

For the next few minutes, he’ll find another spot on the dancefloor that he deems somehow better, then pull me over to it, and then continue to exchange gestures of affection, including offering beer and cigarettes, asking how I’m feeling, making ‘small talk’ about where we’re both from, hugging me, draping his arm across my shoulders and clutching me to his chest (he’s much taller than me), and even occasionally trying to engage me in hip-bumping and ass-slapping (we weren’t very co-ordinated in that regard).

By the time we had migrated to the front of the crowd, he had introduced me to most of his other 5 friends, none of them by name but rather always, “This is my best friend!” Then he would tell them I was from Canada and then we’d have a short conversation about Canada over the din of the music. Invariably, they would immediately offer me their drinks or their cigarettes.

At several points during this encounter, as my new buddy and I would look over at each other at the same time during a particularly exciting moment in the music, he would yell in my ear, “You’re a nice guy! I like you very much!” Now, this was in his somewhat-rusty English, so I’m guessing that he meant this in a more platonic way, but regardless: he was expressing feelings of warmth and attachment to a guy that he just met half an hour ago.

Just as I was thinking of leaving to catch up with my friend at the brewery party, he leans into me and says, “If some guy…gives you…any problems, you tell me.” Charmed but also a bit disturbed by the implications of this gesture of protectiveness, I said, “Thanks, but I’m not the sort of person to have problems with guys in clubs.” He immediately answers, “Of course! You’re a nice guy. I don’t think you would ever hurt anybody. I like you.” And then a hug. It’s not necessarily true that I don’t have problems with other people on the dancefloor (see 2 Fridays ago in Paris LINK), but I took this to be a sort of compliment and thanked him. The topic of discussion was uncomfortably serious and violent for me, but he seemed to be wanting to articulate intimacy to me in an idiom of protectiveness that I just wasn’t used to. Most of my friends are jokingly referential when they say, “I got yo’ back.” They’re not about to beat up a stranger for crossing me.

Anyway, it was past 4h30 and it seemed like the right time to head over to the Kindl Brauerei party. I might’ve been tempted to let the party slide and go directly to Berghain (or sleep), but I was really determined to see this friend of mine. I told my new buddy that I would be “right back.” It was a lie, but it was simpler and smoother than explaining my itinerary for tonight, and then resisting as he tried to convince me to stay with him. It’s pretty common to have these moments of passing, glancing contact, so I figured that he wouldn’t be too distressed if I just disappeared.

So I headed out and made my way towards Ostbahnhof, only to remember that the S-Bahn doesn’t run between Ostbahnhof and Jannowitzbrücke at this hour. I walked to Jannowitzbrücke and realized that the southbound platform for the U8 is out over service for renovations, so I walked down to Heinrich-Heine Straße. There was a lot of walking involved.

5h30: Champagnerama @ Kindl Brauerei

On the way down on the U-8, a group of very drunk and rowdy guys (and one gal) get on at Kottbusser Tor, clutching large bottles of beer in their hands. They shout-sing some song loudly every few minutes, and otherwise engage in some loud and slurred conversation that I could barely make out. Standing near me is another young German, quietly watching the goings-on. Every few minutes, we’ll exchange glances and eyebrow-waggles and then go back to watching them nearly make fools of themselves and annoy everyone in the train car. At a moment when the other guys aren’t paying attention, he says (in English), “Sorry.” I shrug my shoulders and say, “Normal,” implying that this was par for the course on a Saturday night (this word has a slightly different meaning in German). He shakes his head, saying, “No, it’s never normal.”

I get off at Boddinstraße and try to surreptitiously follow some folks who look like party people, since I don’t know exactly where the brewery is. They lead me to their apartment instead. Yay! So much for that strategy. I ask some random guy walking down the street and thankfully he gives me directions.

As I’m approaching the Alte Kindl Brauerei, a guy coming in the other direction stops and tells me that it’s not worth trying to get in, the building’s already at capacity. Well, great. I wasn’t about to give up without laying eyes on the situation, but I thanked him for the warning.

When I got in front of the building, there was a small lineup of 30-40 people, but it was barely moving. There was something like a “one in, one out” policy in effect, but it was even slower, since they had to worry about people coming back into the party. The system at most clubs in Berlin is that once you’ve paid the entry, you have the right to return and skip the line as long as the club is open.

So I send a text message to my friend to see if she’s still coming and get in line. I had hoped that she might say, “Screw it! Let’s just all go to Berghain.” But instead, she just told me she’d be getting there an hour or two later. Dammit.

While in line, I made friends with two Irish boys standing next to me. One of them thought that I was American, and when I corrected him, he apologized profusely and said, “Well, now you can call us British and we can’t get mad.” Fair enough, although I don’t think there’s quite the same animosity between Canada and the US.

After a while, two kids coming out of the club offered to give their admission bracelets to the Irish guys, so that they could skip the line. They gave it a try, but the bouncer actually pulled on their bracelets to see if they had been removed before. When they easily came apart, they were sent back to the line.

I got some amusement while waiting in line by watching the Irish boys get increasingly incensed with the rampant queue-jumping going on. On both the British and Irish isles, there’s a great degree of respect for the etiquette of lining up, and violating it is often treated as a grave ethical breach. You can seriously get your ass kicked in the UK over jumping the lineup.

This just got more amusing when a really large group of Greek partygoers showed up and just walked up to where we were standing. They lamely struck up conversation with a few people standing in front of us, and then acted as if they belonged there. Apparently, one of the Irish boys used to date a Greek guy and the relationship ended very badly, and so he was suddenly projecting all of his resentment onto the hapless ringleader of these partygoers.

Of course, rather than yell and hurl insults, the Irish lads decide to be passive-aggressive. One of them introduces himself to the ringleader and asks, “So where are you guys from?” Then the other pipes in, “Do you come from a country where you don’t usually wait in lines? Because the line starts back there, not here. I understand that might be hard to grasp.” It had no effect, but it amused me.

Lots of pushing and crowding. The two Irish boys get in before me as the lineup/crowd converges. I’m getting squeezed in by a group of annoying Spaniards behind me.

The bouncers change shifts just as I’m at the front of the line. The new bouncer asks me if I’m alone and then asks me where I’ve been before this. I tell him Maria am Ostbahnhof, and he looks me up and down, and then lets me in. WTF? The previous bouncer hadn’t been refusing anybody at the door and then suddenly I get to the front of the line and he’s replaced by Mr. Door Policy. Anyway, I don’t know if saying “Maria am Ostbahnhof” rather than Berghain or Wateragte helped me or hindered me, but I got in.

Well, the location was definitely cool. I mean, it’s a dilapidated beer factory turned into a massive party complex. Almost the entire event takes place downstairs in a series of underground rooms. In most cases, the original fixtures of the rooms are left intact, including massive brass vats poking up through the floor, piping going every which way, tiled drains and so on. Nonetheless, they did include some nice touches of décor, including cylindrical lights hanging behind the DJ booth in one of the main rooms, and a sort of multi-colored tic-tac-toe board hanging behind the DJ in the other big room. The sound was pretty good in the lower two rooms, while the upper room seems to be more devoted to chill-out music or something like that. I’m pretty sure Jens Bond was spinning in the larger room, but I could be wrong.

Upstairs, the coat-check is full and so I have the dubious pleasure of spending the next few hours with my jacket on and my scarf still wrapped around me. Great. At least the drinks are relatively cheap.

While dancing, some guy asks me if I have any rolling papers. I say no, sorry. He asks for tobacco. I say no, sorry. Then he looks at me for a moment, and says “Ja, ja” sarcastically, as if I was clearly lying and then stalks off angrily. Lay off the speed, buddy.

I sit down on the ledge of what I must presume used to be some sort of drainage pit. I’m pretty sure that it’s nastily dirty, but I’m tired and I tell myself that jeans were made for these sorts of conditions. A moment later, a guy taps my shoulder and says, “What are you doing, sitting in all this crap?! Here, I have a bunch of those plastic bags you use to collect dog shit. Sit on one of them the way I am.” And he handed me one and pointed to how he had laid one out for himself. I smiled, thanked him, and sat back down.

He was a friendly chap, so we chatted for a bit. When he heard that I was from Canada, he suddenly got very enthusiastic. Apparently, he had once wanted to become a hockey player in the NHL, and his favourite team was Les Canadiens. I couldn’t follow everything he said, but he was certainly happy to have met a Canadian, it seemed.

At that moment, I get a text message from my friend. She’s here! And she wants to know where to meet. I tell her in the hallway between the two main rooms, say goodbye to the would-be hockey player and make my way over. A few minutes later, I’m reunited with my friend and she drags me over to where most of the rest of her friends are.

Her ex-boyfriend was there and clearly out of his gourd, because he greeted me as if we were long lost buddies, rather than just guys who happened to know the same two women. He was never this affectionate last summer, perhaps because of the tension between him, his ex-girlfriend and my former roommate, but voilà: he hugged me tightly, cupped my jaw in his hands, made lingering eye contact, and then promptly presented me with a bottle of poppers. Yech, but thanks, I suppose. One tentative sniff of that crap reminded me of why I hate that stuff.

Before I could talk to her any more, my friend disappeared and I couldn’t find her for an hour. Instead, I hung around with her ex-bf as we migrated from one room to another, dancing and drinking. Eventually, I texted her and asked her where she was and she said she was behind the “DJ pult” (DJ booth). Really? I ran into one of her other friends and we both wandered through both rooms, trying to find her. There was no ‘behind’ the DJ booth in the second room, and the first room had only a small backstage area that was clearly closed off. Once I saw her ex-bf wander out from behind the stage, though, I put two and two together. This chick is well-connected.

I eventually found her, distributing lines of speed to all of her friends. Yay! Sorta. I finally managed to chat with her, but not without the bouncer trying to bounce me out of the area. He wasn’t at all concerned that people were doing lines, but he didn’t want random strangers backstage. Once he saw that I was with her, he backed off but then started harassing her about leaving. Feh.

Once we were finally shooed out onto the dancefloor near the bar, I hung around with my friend for a while as she talked about some very difficult and complicated romantic conflicts she had had last summer. This exchange happened as we stood next to the bar near the front of the main room, surrounded by her friends who were all dancing and chatting happily. I was really glad to be able to talk to her and give her some support, but it all seemed really incongruous to the context. On the other hand, if there’s ever a place where you can talk about personal stuff and not be overheard / noticed, it’s at a loud, crowded club.

My friend and her party disappeared into another corner to do more lines of speed, and I eventually caught up with them. When I did, I told her that I would be gone for a short while to find my friends and convince them to come back to the brewery party with me. Again, I was lying to make a departure that would otherwise involve lots of cajoling and pressure.

This time, on my way out, I treat myself to a cab. I’ve had enough walking for a while, thank you.

9h30: Berghain

I got to Berghain at about 9h30 and there was (thankfully) no lineup to be seen. The bouncer let me in without so much as a blink, and I was upstairs and dancing in no time. Bob and Donna were already there, along with Foster and the German galpal of Janine. Janine herself wasn’t due to come by until 13h00 or so (she didn’t actually show up until 16h00 or 17h00, but she’s perennially late). Fantômette and her crew never showed up, though, despite my frequent text messages. At some point around noon, I realize that I’m the only person that hasn’t slept tonight. Everyone else I knew had gone home and taken a substantial nap before coming to Berghain. Meanwhile, I had been at that brewery party.

So as I got there, a DJ called I:Cube was still spinning. His set was OK, mostly minimal techno with very little house influences, but it tended to be a bit same-y. That is, the tracks all tended to run together and yet the set also lacked continuity. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t complain; if I had heard that set any place other than Panorama Bar, I would’ve been thrilled.

Prosumer and Steffi were listed to do a long back-to-back set from 13h00 to 20h00, but that was complicated a bit by the fact that Steffi appeared to be drunk and/or very high. She still managed to beatmatch occasionally and she was certainly able to manipulate the mixer to play with the levels, but in the end Prosumer did the lion’s share of the mixing. Their set started off a bit too mellow and heavy on the vocal-house, but by about 14h00 or so things started to get pretty good and for at least a couple of hours I was having a fantastic time. I appreciated that there was a bit of alternation between more housey minimal tracks and straight-ahead techno-minimal tracks. But also, I think I was impressed by skill of both Prosumer and Steffi to manipulate the EQ levels to create climaxes and breakdowns and to otherwise give shape to the set.

Meanwhile, down in the Berghain room since about 9h00, Monika Kruse was giving a marathon, 8-hour set. I would head down every once in a while to check it out, but I rarely stuck around for longer than 20 or 30 minutes. Her mixing was flawless, her demeanor was always very self-controlled and professional, and her selection was definitely appropriate for the Berghain room, but I find the typical sound of that room a bit too heavy-handed and pounding, and so I was having the same problem’s with Kruse’s set. Very well done, but just not as fun for me as the sound in Panorama Bar.

Nonetheless, Kruse gets major props from me for dropping that remix of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” which came out relatively recently. It was remixed first by Booka Shade and M.A.N.D.Y., and then re-remixed by various other DJs on the release (on Get Physical Music). The remix I heard that night was the Reboot 20 Cubans remix, methinks. Anyway, it was great.

So by 20h00, nd_baumecker started his set up in Panorama Bar. Bob and Donna had just left, and Janine and her friend were about to leave as well. Nonetheless, I kept going for a little while longer to hear the first hour of his set (which was excellent but just a bit harder than I normally like) and then threw in the towel at 21h00. Considering that I had started my night with drinks at Fantômette’s place at 20h00 the previous day, I was feeling pretty proud of my marathon partying. I didn’t quite make it to the closing of Berghain (which can run as late as midnight Sunday), but I did pretty well for myself.

The ride back home on transit felt very long and just a bit painful (24 hours of dancing will do that to you), but it just made things feel all the better when I finally got home. I took a shower before even approaching the bed, and I also made myself a few eggs and a bit of tea. Essen ist wichtig! And so, at about 22h00 Sunday night, I went to bed at a “normal” hour, having not slept at all the night before.

Shopping, Won-Tons, Golden Gate, PanoramaBar

2009-03-06T01:10:00.000+01:00

After a pretty crazy week, the most delicious luxury of today was sleeping in. Mmm, slumber-gasmic!

So Florian was actually planning to leave Berlin for Holland early Saturday morning, so he had a few errands to run today. As he dashed off to take care of that, I showered, changed, “read the Internet” (a phrase I’m borrowing from Florian) and caught up a bit on correspondence and blogging. At around 13h30 or 14h00, Florian called to say that he was done with his errands, and we arranged to meet at a café called Ciao di Berlino, at the corner of Wichertstraße and Greifhagener Straße. The food was pretty decent, involving standard “healthy” German soups and pesto-heavy Italian sandwiches. I had the “organic red beet soup,” which was tasty, but it also terrified me with its clothes-staining qualities.

The décor, however, was adorable. The main seating area had a silhouette of a green landscape running around the room at eye level, with little details like lakes with ships, bridges, and so on. On the far wall, around the doorway that led to the next seating area, was a massive print of a snowy mountain peak descending into grassy hills. All of the seats had pillows with silhouettes of forest animals silk-screened onto the corner. Anyway, it was cute.

Shopping!

*girlish squeal*

After lunch, we hit the nearby Asian market to buy the ingredients for Vietnamese summer rolls to take to a won-ton potluck party tonight. My knowledge of Asian cuisine can be pretty spotty, but one thing I’ve come to make with some skill are those delicious non-fried rice-paper rolls. Mmm.

From there I left Florian to return home and pack his bags, while I headed out for a bit of shopping. Well actually, we both stopped in a trashy dollar-store near the U-Bahn stop first, where we found these awesome felt coasters with silhouettes of teapots and apples and wine bottles. So cute! And only 0.65€.

My plan was to just do some window-shopping, but that didn’t last. The fashion in designer shops here is a lot more modern and brightly-coloured than what I find in Paris, and the prices are generally lower (although not cheap). Anyway, I apparently left my self-control at home. I think I also managed to rationalize the minor spending spree with the fact that I’ve barely done any shopping in Paris in these past 6 months or so.

I bought a pair of jeans at Hummel that were dark denim with bright violet contrast stitching. They were the display pair, so I managed to get a 10% discount. Yay!

In the store 2 doors down, I picked up this adorable sweater that had three stripes in a V-shape across the chest. The sweater itself was powder blue, and the stripes were violet, blue and turquoise. Very hott.

Finally, I stopped in this store called O.K. that sells odd and brightly-coloured items often made from recycled materials and from developing countries (i.e., coin purses woven from candy wrappers). I got a couple of gifts for people back home (no details! They might be reading) and then decided that I better head home before I do any more damage to my financial situation.

Dinner: Won-Ton Hoedown in Charlottenburg

After getting home and showing off my stuff to Florian (who was kind enough to my approving noises) I assembled the summer rolls and we got ready to head out for the won-ton party.

We headed over to the apartment of these friends of Florian, a couple that live in a MASSIVE apartment in Charlottenburg for 400€ / month. Seriously. They had this beautiful apartment with high ceilings, an office, a parlor and a bedroom, along with a massive bathroom and a similarly large kitchen. I swear, this thing was easily 1000 sq.ft (92m2) As is usual, all of my time in Berlin is spent in rabid jealously of people’s apartments. Sigh.

Anyway, the meal was great. We fried up the wontons right there at the table, gorged ourselves on all the other dishes that people had brought, and drank a lot of wine. There was some discussion of ceviche recipes, Paris, and what goes on in darkrooms at Berghain. I plead innocence to introducing the last topic, which was actually brought up by a straight guy (or, at least, heterosexually-partnered) who had a surprisingly intimate knowledge of the sleazier side of Berghain. Hooray for Berlin.

Things a got a bit blurrier as the meal went on (there was a fair bit of wine), but I do recall that at some point someone had the great idea of making wontons filled with Nutella and bananas. Then someone tried the same thing with nectarines and blue cheese. They were pretty damn good, I must say. Well worth a try at my place one of these days…

By 1h00 or so, almost everyone else had left and I was getting messages from my Frenchy crew (Fantômette and the rest) saying that they were done dinner and heading off to a club in their area. So I made my goodbyes and wandered my way back to the S-Bahn stop to head into Kreuzberg.

André Crom @ Golden Gate (club)

On the train over to the first club, I get a call from Fantô saying that they couldn’t find the club, so instead they were going to go to Golden Gate, which just happened to be near where my train was at the moment.

So I got off and headed over to the club, which is under the S-Bahn tracks near Jannowitzbrücke. It’s actually literally built in under the tracks, which is kind of neat; I imagine that it had been a storage area or something before. The club itself was sort of small, dark, almost entirely of brick and a bit grimy. Just like I like it. It was almost like someone’s apartment, with the first room (dancefloor) sort of the size of a salon, the second room (bar) the size of a bedroom, and then some bathrooms upstairs.

There was an outdoor area for smoking and chilling out, which involved a bunch of beat-up couches and armchairs with blankets, covered by a series of tents. It was nice out there, but a bit too cold. There were a number of DJs playing that night, but the one spinning while we were there was André Crom. Good, solid techno, although also not very exciting. Fantô pointed out that the tracks that he releases are very minimal and finely wrought, while what he was doing tonight was a heavy-handed pounding techno set.

The crowd was almost exclusively local Germans, which was cool as well. It was nice to discover a new location, after many weekends of visiting the same 2 or 3 clubs recently. Even this summer, I tended to go to a certain circuit of clubs, including especially Berghain/Panorama, Watergate, Club der Visionäre and Bar25.

By approx 4h00, Fantô and crew had had enough and they split. Although they were heading home to crash, I still had plans to meet my London-based Frenchy friends, Bob and Donna over at Panorama Bar. I hung around for a little while longer, and then got my jacket and headed off. Panorama Bar isn’t too far from Golden Gate, so I headed over on foot and stopped at a gas station on the way for a bag of chips to soak up some of the alcohol.

Get Perlonized night @ Panorama Bar

I got to Panorama Bar at around 5h or 5h30, so I apparently missed the Half Hawaii (the collaborative project of Sammy Dee and Bruno Pronsato) live set. I’m fine with that, since I heard a bit of them at mutek last year and wasn’t impressed.

There wasn’t much of a line at the door and I got in pretty quickly. The American bouncer, Mike, was checking bags and he gave me a full soul handshake, including that whole shoulder-to-shoulder half-hug thing. Yay! Nobody does soul shakes in Europe, so it sort of reminded me of home in a nostalgic way. Later that night, a French girl I had just met would gush at the fact that I did the bise ritual (air kisses on both cheeks) with her before leaving. “Je me sens chez moi!” (I feel at home!) she said, complaining that Germans never do the kissy-kissy thing (not true, in my experience, but they certainly do it less).

I found Bob & Donna and we spent some time catching up and chatting. Vincent Lemieux was spinning (apparently a Canuck) whose set involved some nice minimal house, but with some vocal-house tracks that I liked less. Later in the morning, around 8 or so, Sammy Dee got on the decks for a while and kicked out an excellent series of punchy, dry and yet bass-heavy tracks.

Sometime at around 8h00 or so, I had this massive wave of nausea and I had to sit in a corner and fan myself out of a cold sweat. I’m not one to feel nauseous for nothing, so I took it seriously and got off the dance floor. Bob was nice enough to come check on me, but there wasn’t much to do other than wait for it to pass. Once it passed, I was feeling much better, but tired and with a bit of a headache.

They had finished with the renovations of the bathrooms at Pano (mentioned briefly in my last visit), which were pretty neat. They had one big set of bathrooms with plenty of stalls and new, clean-looking tiles and metal toilets and so on (of course, it didn’t stay clean very long, but the design was pretty hygiene-oriented). They lowered the ceilings on the toilets (which had been two stories, like the rest of the club) and then put in a mezzanine above it with couches for sitting around. It was a really nice idea, although Bob was right to point out that it was a mistake to break through the wall into the dance floor and put a little balcony there. While it gave a great view over the crowd, it allowed the sound to spill into the next room, which made it harder to talk there. Also, on Saturday night, I would discover that the mezzanine allows drunk/high people to spray the crowd below with their drinks.

At some point near the smoking area, I make friends with another very friendly German dude (this is something of a pattern: I walk through the Berghain smoking area, some talkative German guy makes friends with me). He starts by asking me if I have any cigarettes, and then we spend the next few minutes chatting about where we’re from, how hard it is to learn a new language, and so on. At some point, two other guys that he doesn’t seem to know pass by and ask for a lighter. In return, one of the guys passes out some Menthos candies, which made me think of those absurd “Menthos, full of life!” commercials, and that made me chuckle. I bet they weren’t thinking of Berghain at 8am when they made those commercials. Anyway, they got talking and I wanted to go dance, so I said goodbye and disappeared.

Later that evening, Bob introduced me a German friend of his, who told me that he works in music. He’s a sound engineer, but he also makes music. When I asked what kind, he told me that, although he’s straight, he’s developed a gay rapper persona that raps about gay sex in clubs in German-inflected English. I would’ve thought he was joking, if he hadn’t started freestyling for me right there. That shit cracked me the fuck up. In response, all I could say was, “Geil” (sexy). I’ll have to ask Bob for his website, because his work needs to be exposed to the world.

At around 8h30 or so, I finally decided to throw in the towel and head home. On the way out, Mike gave me another soul shake, so I felt like a bouncer-knowing, club-getting-into badass. w00t!

I stopped at the kebab place near the Ostbahnhof station and forced myself to eat a kebab, thinking that a bit of food might settle my stomach, although I was already feeling better.

The train ride home was a bit complicated, mostly due to the fact that I thought I would catch the M1 tram from Hackescher Markt, which would bring me a few blocks closer to home than the U2. However, the northbound stop for the M1 at Hackescher Markt is in a rather non-obvious place, which required walking around the neighborhood for a bit and following the tram tracks. Anyway, I got home, peeled off my clothes, and got into bed.

Oh, by the way: I was breaking in my new jeans tonight and I totally forgot that dark-wash jeans have a lot of indigo dye in them when you first buy them. Every couple of hours, I had to wash the blue dye off my hands. Hah.

Jump into Berlin

2009-03-05T23:51:00.002+01:00

Ok, it’s time for another time-warp. Since the antics of last Saturday’s Salon d’Agriculture, my week was pretty uninteresting, but really busy. A few IT issues exploded at work, and it sort of took over my life for a few days. The highlight was probably last Monday, when a friend of mine had a little apéro / soirée at her place to celebrate her b-day for those who can’t be in town for her official b-day celebrations (i.e., me and a few other Frenchy folks heading to Berlin). I offered to make food, and so I came with a big bag full of Peruvian goodies. Arroz chaufa, ceviche, ocopa, and so on.

Anyway, we come to Thursday! I had an afternoon flight today to Berlin to begin my weekend of debauchery/research, so I had to leave directly from work with my luggage and sprint to Orly airport. I got to my plane on time and all, but EasyJet had several other flights leaving at about the same time and the check-in area was a mess.

The flight was fine and I got into town at around 21h00 or so. As soon as I turned on my phone, I was checking in with my folks in Berlin, including Florian, my gracious host, N., a former roommate from last summer, Fantômette (who needs no introduction at this point), and K., a friend of another former roommate from last summer.

While on the train into town, I heard from Florian that he and some friends had just left an art gallery opening and were heading off to Cocolo, a ramen noodle joint that Florian had taken me to back in November. I had some trouble finding the imbiss in the maze of streets behind Hackescher Markt and my luggage slowed me down, so by the time I got to Totoro, they had already finished eating and Florian’s friends were getting ready to leave.

But Florian, bless his kindly Dutch soul, stuck around to keep me company as I had a bowl of tonkatsu ramen, which involved ramen noodles with half a smoked-boiled egg, smoked pork shoulder, tofu, and sweet BBQ pork belly. God, was that fucking awesome. I also had their roasted rice tea, which was lovely.

From there, we walked over towards Rosa Luxembourg Platz to grab a few drinks at a bar called Bar 3 (yes, seriously). It was densely packed with the denizens of the Berlin art scene, along with a lot of cigarette smoke. There was a strong majority of Anglophones in the room, at least by my ear. We ran into a friend of Florian’s that runs an art gallery, and we got to watch him do his “work,” flitting from conversation to conversation, discerning the artists from the buyers, making introductions, etc. Florian and I also amused ourselves by identifying the various cliques in the room, including the Rather Young Art-Fags That Dress In Ironic Versions Of The Fashions Of Their 20th-Century Queer Forbears. I swear, if you saw them, you’d know what I was talking about.

By about 0h30, we finally decided to head home. It was rainy and kinda gross, but the walk to the station was relatively short. Florian kept apologizing for Berlin’s cobblestone sidewalks, as I struggled to roll my luggage over to his place. It wasn’t that bad, mind you. I managed those streets with three pieces of luggage last summer. Anyway, we got back to his place, had some tea, and got some sleep.

Fast Times at the Salon d'Agriculture

2009-02-28T14:32:00.000+01:00

Woo! Le Salon d'Ag!

You might wonder why I'm all excited about the nation-wide equivalent of a state fair. Well, if you look at my post from this same event two years ago, you'll see that le Salon d'Agriculture is a fine place for food and alcohol-related fun. Too much fun, at times.

While I was trying to avoid the debauchery of last time (and two of my companions were trying to avoid a repeat of last week's drunken poker game), we nonetheless managed to "discover" a fair bit of food and alcohol from the various regions of France. The whole thing was too much of a jumble to recount in linear form, but here are some highlights:

One of my friends immediately opined that the crowd at the Salon was not at all Parisian or even from another large French town. The fashion, the accents, the attitudes (or lack thereof) all pointed to the folks that populate the countryside and small villages.
On that note, we proceeded to buy sandwiches from a booth selling various kinds of cured meats. The young man that helped us was being rather talkative and smiley, as if he was trying to hit on all three of us at the same time. Alas, he had very "countryside" teeth.
My companions were apparently too timid to sweet-talk their way into free samples of wine and liquor, so it was up to me to do it for all three of us. In most cases, all you needed to do was approach the booth, ask a couple of anodyne questions about their wine ("I've never heard of Bardol wine, what's it like?"; "Where is you winery located?") and wait for them to propose a tasting. Then, you make some vaguely-informed comments about the wine ("hmm, very smooth, but also a bit sweet." "wonderfully dry and just a bit tart" "lots of character, but a bit more tannic than I would normally drink"). And then, you make some gestures that imply that you're interested in ordering, but just not right now ("Do you take orders by phone?" "Do you have a website?"). The same technique applies to other kinds of foodstuffs and spirits.
One vintner pointedly presented us with a crachoir (spit-bucket), as if to see if we were really there to taste the wines and possibly buy, or just to get drunk. We didn't spit.
There were some disctinctive regional differences between wine-sellers. Pretty much, anybody not located in Bordeaux or Burgundy was thrilled to have us at his/her booth and spent ages presenting his/her wines. The people from Burgundy and Bordeaux, however, were dealing in 30€+ bottles of wine, and were selling wine like used-car salespeople. They would quickly offer you lots of samples from very expensive vintages, and then lean on you to order a crate of something right away. One guy in the Bordeaux section gave me at least 4 different tastings, and then whipped out his order book and started filling out an order. When I asked him to give me an estimate and I would come back later in the day, he gave me this whithering look that made one of my companions start to nervously try to back me up ("We'll be back for sure! When just need to think about it"). Not unironically, his reaction prevented me from coming back and making a smaller order (I had been thinking of maybe getting 6 bottles and paying a slightly higher delivery price).
After one of the trio had left, we the remaining pair headed back into the salon for a few more rounds. We discovered a beer made in the Champagne region that was surprisingly tasty, so I bought a bottle.
Near the end of our time there, we hit the stands in the DOM-TOM regions (yes, all of France's tropical territories were grouped together in the salon, like a little island of bright colours and loud music). We shared a sandwich filled with a sort of ginger-chicken, which was a bit messy. We were leaning on the counter of the neighboring stand, which was otherwise empty and already had the detritus of previous visitors. A moment later, just a piece of chicken fell out of the sandwich, a guy who was presumably the owner of the stand came up and started yelling at us for making a mess. I took the napkin I had and used it to clean up the counter so that there was no trace of our presence. The owner came back and started saying, "I'm not yelling at you to bother you, but—" to which my friend angrily replied, "Of course you're bothering me!" and walked off. This left me trapped with the angry owner, who gripped my forearm rather tightly and kept on insisting that my friend shouldn't have gotten angry. I told him that we had cleaned up after ourselves (and the detritus of others, besides) and that he should leave it at that, and then I managed to pry myself loose from his grip and rejoin my friend.
While at one of the French-Caribbean booths, we witnessed a group of guys getting stinking drunk on rum drinks. Obviously they were partying to forget something, because one of them started to stare morosely into his glass and get very quiet. One of his friends noticed and tried to cheer him up, but whatever it was that was bugging him got to his friend, too, and soon they were both wiping away tears from red-rimmed eyes. Soon, the rest of the group noticed them, took turns consoling them with hugs, pats on the shoulder, tousling of hair and so on, until they managed to cajole them into at least the appearance of a better mood. All of this was interesting and touching and all that, were it not for the fact that it was going on in a brightly-lit convention centre. There's probably something to be said about most intimate / empathetic stuff happening in dimly-lit or dark places.

The difference one asshole can make

2009-02-27T12:21:00.001+01:00

Yes, as you might imagine, tonight doesn't end very well. Nothing catastrophic, mind you, just shitty.

Anyway, I started my day by making a short trip to my neighborhood market to get a few things for me, but also the fixings for chimichurri. A friend of mine is having a birthday party next Monday, and I had offered to make some Peruvian food for the event. There rest of the stuff I was going to prepare on Sunday, but I thought I could at least prepare the chimichurri early, since the stuff actually benefits from sitting and curing for a while.

Also, after more than a week of living on a strict fish-and-vegetables diet, I decided to treat myself to a tasty, tasty roast chicken. I managed to get one that had perfectly-roasted skin; when the skin is browned and just beginning to get crispy, it's like kryptonite to me. Anyway, since I hadn't eaten breakfast and last night's dinner had been pretty light, I fell on the chicken like a madman and pretty much picked its bones clean. Now, even though roasting chickens here in France tend to be smaller than the bionic creatures you find in the US, that was still a lot of poultry-flesh. I spent at least an hour afterwards, just staring at the wall and wondering what I had done to myself. I pretty much didn't eat anything else that day, except for some carrot sticks later that evening.

Anyway, the rest of the afternoon was pretty unexciting. I finished my manuscripts for the two entries I'm contributing to the 2nd edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music, submitted them, and then did some work back-tagging my blog. That is, I went through some of the first posts I made to my blog and added the tags that I've developed since then. This is somewhat important for my project, because I have a few tags that correspond to particular chapters in my thesis (i.e., Touch, Solidarity, Affect), which I'm using as a marker so that I can come back later and cull some anecdotes to structure my chapters. The task was slowed down considerably by the fact that Blogger doesn't offer a convenient way to label and re-label more than one post at a time, but it was also much slowed by the fact that I couldn't resist reading these posts from almost 2 years ago. Good times, good times.

So, on to this evening's activities

Get On To Get Off: Heartthrob, Butane and Yakine @ Le Rex

Actually, I started my night at On Cherche Encore..., where Fantômette and Franck Valat were spinning for the evening. I spent maybe an hour hanging out with them, but I had to split shortly afterwards. I was on Yakine's guestlist for the event at Le Rex, and since he was spinning first in the evening, I needed to be there well before he finished his set.

I hopped on a vélib and made my way over by approx 1h00, and got through the line pretty quickly. I checked my coat and headed out onto the dancefloor, which was still pretty empty. As a friend of mine had pointed out last weekend, the first couple of hours at most clubs in Paris look markedly similar. Large groups of young guys that would normally have trouble getting into a club show up very early (when the bouncers are less picky) and buy bottle service (which also helps secure your entry). The result is that you have this odd landscape of empty-ish dancefloors, and tables filled with clots of similarly-dressed young men, nursing tiny doses of alcohol mixed with some juice. There's an air of anticipation/desperation that I normally would associate with the end of the night, really.

0h00-2h30: Yakine

Anyway, I ran into my friends S. and D., who were also there to see Yakine spin. The three of us hung out near the DJ booth, trying to make our support of Yakine as visible and physically present as possible. By about 2h00, other friends started to show up and the dancefloor was filling in. His set started off rather low-key, but by about 1h30 he had moved into higher-intensity tracks and he started getting into it. He's a relatively quiet guy, and so he can be a bit stone-faced on the decks. However, by the second half of his set, he was cracking a smile more often and looking like he was genuinely having fun. His track selection was solid and his transitions were always smooth; my only quibble with his technique was his tendency to cut the bass during the breakdown of a track, and then bring it back a few beats after the track itself had already kicked back in. You can hear it because the bass kick in the track usually has some upper-frequency element that passes through the low-cut filter and creates a sort of "echo" effect of the bass that would normally be there. So his manipulations of the bass kick was sometimes out of sync with the track itself, but otherwise the set was great.

2h30-4h00: Heartthrob live

Heartthrob's set was good, but I have to admit that I've heard better from him. The set started off pretty weak, but that's sort of to be expected; it's a live set, and in live sets the performer tends to start off with some broad gesture that falls flat 50% of the time. Nonetheless, he was pretty slow in getting off the ground. By about 30 minutes into the set, things picked up and got interesting, with slightly more complex bass patterns and punchier samples. He still has a fondness for sustained, echo-y, granular washes that I don't share, but I've made peace with that aspect of his aesthetics.

So, now to the asshole. I was dancing at the front of the room, in front of the live setup, against the metal stanchions they had installed around Heartthrob. By now, there was a crushing crowd all around, as clearly the entire techno-loving population of Paris had come out to adulate the scion of the Minus label. There was this guy dancing to the left of me, who was occasionally shoving his way into my space. I managed to hold my ground, but then a cute girl sidled up on the other side of him and complained that she didn't have enough room to dance. The prospect of possibly bedding her was clearly all the motivation he needed, and he barreled into me, pushing me into the person on the other side of me. I tried to push back, but the person on the other side was pushing back at the same time, so I ended up being forced behind both of them, and their shoulders closed in front of me. Annoyed and a bit bruised, I went back to dancing, but made a point of dancing right up close behind the asshole and occasionally co-ordinating my dancing so that I would "accidentally" collide with him pretty hard.

A few minutes later, I decided to go find my friends. My bag was hanging on the metal stanchion, right in front of the asshole, so I had to reach between him and the girl and start untying my bag. He seemed to think that I was trying to elbow my way in between him and the girl, and so he started pushing really hard on me, and I was holding onto my bag, which was tied to the stanchion, so the whole thing was threatening to tip over and the strap on my bag was probably going to break. After shoving back for a moment, I put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed as hard as I could, and started yelling in his ear that I was trying to get to my !@#$ing bag. He gave me a bit of space and said, "Well, get your bag, then." as if he hadn't just been doing his best to prevent that. I finally removed my bag, let loose a string of curses at him, and moved on.

However, the interaction had put me in a foul mood, and it wasn't being helped by all the other people colliding with me as I made my way across the dancefloor. I found my friends and spoke briefly with them, choosing not to tell them about the confrontation, since they at least seemed to be having a lot of fun, and I didn't want to bring them down. If I had really been loving the music, I probably would've been able to overcome my own foul mood and get back into the partying spirit, but Heartthrob wasn't inspiring me and the nastyness of the whole situation tainted the rest of the night for me. I guess it's not surprising how much of a difference one asshole can make to a whole night. Much in the same way that a bouncer/doorperson can make or break your night out (especially in Berlin), one sufficiently dickish jerk can suck the fun right out of your evening.

I stayed around until about 4h00, waiting patiently for my mood to improve, and then finally gave up and headed home.

The bike ride home was pleasant, at least.

Luis does Bobby Jindal (but not like that, thank you very much)

2009-02-26T22:45:00.002+01:00

Well, yesterday I gave you my play-by-play snark on Obama’s address to the joint session of congress (a sort of unofficial “state of the union” address). So today, I’m giving you my play-by-play reaction (snark) to Bobby Jindal’s response to Obama’s address. I tell you, this was really hard to watch, and not because of his compelling argumentation…

Ok, right from the beginning: who did the lighting for this debacle? How did you manage to make an Indian guy look orange?
Ugh, he sounds like a fourth-grade teacher. The excessive modulation of pitch in his voice (sing-song-y), the overly-slow rhythm of his speech, and his insistence on placing a massive emphasis on every remotely important word makes feels like condescension. It’s gong to be hard to convince us if you’re insulting our intelligence with your delivery…
And the hand gestures! People made fun of Obama for punctuating everything with a hand-jab, but this is kinda rediculous. The fact that it’s the same double-handed sawing gesture all the time makes it look like a nervous tic. He seems profoundly uncomfortable and ill at ease.
Oh great, now he’s making remarks about how great it is that a black guy is the President. I suspect that this is going to be the new opening gambit for Republicans voicing opposition to the still hugely popular president: “See? We’re sensitive to racial issues! Now, about that uppity president’s stimulus plan…” Also, the combination of the facile congratulations with Jindal’s condescending tone is especially galling: “Good for you, boy! Have a cookie!” Yes, Obama is black and the president at the same time; this is very historical and stuff, as evidenced by the fact that everyone and his or her dog has been saying so since November 4th. It’s no longer a new insight for anyone, so the fact that you keep repeating it is telling, IMHO.
“The President completed a redemptive journey…” oy vey.
Oh, now I see where he’s going with this: “Obama’s a child of foreigners, and I am too! So you should have the same warm feelings for me! (Unless you’re racist, in which case please note that I’ve changed my first name from ‘Piyush’ to ‘Bobby’).
“My parents also came from a distant land…” What is this, fairy-tale hour? JUST SAY INDIA! YOU’RE NOT A MEDIEVAL BARD!!
“They instilled in me an immigrant’s wonder at the greatness of America.” Oh fer fuck’s sake. “An immigrant’s wonder”? Really?? Because wherever they’re from, it certainly wasn’t as great as America. OK stopstopstop right here folks, I need to rant for a moment:
- the US really has to drop this “greatest nation on earth” schtick. Do you love your country? Sure. Does this mean that you need to make absolutist claims about its superiority to all other nations of the planet? No, dammit. America is great: OK, at least within an ever-dwindling set of parameters. But the US needs to come up with another form of patriotic expression than superiority and supremacy. There’s a historically important reason why most European countries, for example, avoid this sort of rhetoric like the plague.
OK, back to listening to this.
Now some anecdote about going to the grocery store with his father, and his father saying “Americans can do anything.” Oh, you can already tell this is going to be a motto for this speech.
There you go, he said it again. Is this his version of “Yes we can?” ‘Cause it’s not working so well.
“When we pull together, there’s no challenge we can’t overcome.” Wrong party, Jindal. The Republican party is the party of individual responsibility, not collective care. According to conservative philosophy, you don’t pull together, you act as self-interested parties in a free market that somehow results in a good outcome for everyone…most people…well, the profitable few. Those who don’t fare so well must’ve not worked hard enough.
“Republicans are ready to work with the new president…” I’m glad I wasn’t drinking anything when he said this, as I might’ve damaged my screen with spit-back. What?! The Republican strategy so far has been to minimize any efforts of bipartisanship by Obama and then obstruct his success as much as possible. It’s clear that the plan is to come out of this as newly-devout conservative purists, just as their opposition to everything that comes out of Obama’s office ensures a crashing failure (or so they hope). Gah.
“Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us. Those of us who lived through hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts.” WHAT?! Did you just use the example of Hurricane Katrina to argue that government can’t save us from the financial crisis? Are you seriously arguing that, since the government failed horribly at dealing with Katrina, the government should have no role in dealing with the global economic crisis? Do you really think the government was too involved rescuing people from the floodwaters? What precisely was to be done instead? Anyway, as a Republican, you shouldn’t even utter the word “Katrina” for another 10 years. Christ. That’s it. I quit, I’m out of here.
…
OK, OK, I’m back. But I’m not enjoying this.
“Let me tell you a story…” NO. GIVE A SPEECH, PLEASE. Fuck. I mean, anecdotes are fine and everything, but they should be embedded smoothly into your argumentation, not jammed in there like some sort of entertainment “intermission.”
AAAAAAUGH!!! I’M ONLY 2.30 MINUTES INTO THIS THING! I’M NEVER GOING TO MAKE IT.
Declares his frienship with Terry Lee, a New Orleans Sheriff that has been constantly under criticism for racial profiling.
“some bureaucrat” stopped N.O. citizens from saving others in their boats. Sure. If you’re going to make that claim, you need something more substantive than “some bureaucrat,” as if a tubby caricature in a pin-stripe suit just materialized in the middle of the post-Katrina devastation.
“The strength of America is not found in our government.” There’s the conservative money shot. It’s a pretty tone-deaf argument to make, but fine, at least you’re talking politics now.
“this spirit will get us through the storms that we face today.” No, Bobby. A bunch of people having “spirit” isn’t going to undo the financial crisis we’re in right now. It’s a bit bigger than grassroots organizing and individual volunteer work. Everyone can play a part, yes, but the government must play the part that no other entity can play.
Again, “Americans Can Do Anything™”. No, Bobby, no. Thanks to the last eight years of dwindling civil liberties, Americans certainly aren’t free to do a lot of things. If what you mean is that Americans are capable of anything, again, no. Americans can’t turn back time, they can’t un-kill Iraqis and Afghanis and their own soldier-children, they can’t completely snuff out terrorism, they can’t boss China into doing anything anymore, they can’t be serious about removing illegal workers from the US labor system without causing further collapse in manufacturing, construction and the domestic service industries, and so on. Nor, for that matter, are any other citizens of any other nation capable of anything.
- In fact, just to bring in the Spinoza [LINK], the better point to make is that we can never fully know what Americans are capable of. This means that, at any moment, could potentially surprise ourselves with action we had never thought possible (both in the positive and negative sense). But anyway, I digress.
OK, now the Republican wish-list
Cutting taxes for working families
Cutting taxes for small businesses
“strengthening businesses” whatever that means
new tax credit for home-buyers
“These plans would cost less and create more jobs.” Prove it. This all sounds like an ass-backwards version of what was already proposed in the stimulus bill…only less economically stimulative. A tax credit for home-buyers? I realize that the housing market is in a slump, but encouraging more property speculation isn’t going to help.
Now on to complaints about the stimulus bill
while containing some good policy, it’s “larded” with wasteful spending. Examples follow…
- money to buy new cars for the government
- money for high speed train lines (he calls it a “magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland” which is wrong on all three counts; it’s high-speed rail and the budget hasn’t been allocated to a particular route yet, and that allocation will be done by a former Republican congressman)
- “and 140 million dollars for something called volcano monitoring.” YES, IT’S CALLED VOLCANO MONITORING AND IT HELPS PREVENT MASSIVE LOSS OF LIFE YOU IDIOT. OMG THIS MAKES MY HEAD HURT.
“Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington DC.” Oh I see what you did there. Yes, very clever turn of phrase. Excessive spending is TOTALLY analogous to the threat posed by another Mount St. Helens.
…”saddle future generations with debt.” Yes, thank goodness you weren’t doing any of this when your party was in power.
Apparently, Louisiana is a corruption-free paradise of bipartisan co-operation. Did you hear that, people of New Orleans?
Instead of mirroring Obama’s concerns for the environment, health care and education, here’s his hobby-horse: the price of gas.
“We believe that Americans Can Do Anything™” Ugh. OK, is that the fourth time so far? This is going to kill me.
Apparently, here’s the Republican health-care principle: “No American should have to worry about losing their health-care privileges.” Clever phrasing there. Notice that people who never had healthcare in the first place are not covered by this principle. Nor is the right to affordable healthcare. They just think that it shouldn’t get any worse than it already is. WE’D LIKE AN IMPROVEMENT, THANK YOU.
His take on education: “The Children of America Can Do Anything™”
OK, now he just made a joke about Louisiana being half underwater or half under indictment at all times. Seriously.
Republicans have hope, too! We just don’t hope in the government. Instead, we hope in you, the American people. Group hug!
“Our party got away from its principles.” Oh, here comes the mea culpa
“You elected a Repulican government to champion limited government, fiscal discipline and personal responsibility….Republicans lost your trust, and rightly so.” OK, this would’ve been a good way to start the speech.
Apparently, he’s “determined to regain your trust.” Apparently, by making stupid shit up about ‘excessive spending’ in the stimulus bill.
“This is the nation that cast off the scourge of slavery” Yes, after the rest of the enlightened world had. It took a fucking civil war in the mid 19th-century to get rid of slavery in the US, so let’s not act as if America blazed the way for emancipation in the world.
And, in closing, “Americans Can Do Anything™”
You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you, bobby?

Obama's address to congress, with my snarky comments

2009-02-25T01:54:00.000+01:00

OK, I’m one day late, but I’m watching Barack Obama’s Address to the Joins Session of Congress. Here’s my reactions, as they happen:

The shot from the coverage I’m watching on FOX (I know, it was what I could find on YouTube, OK?) follows Obama as he walks down the aisle into the chamber. What I notice is that it’s like he flanked on both sides by undulating walls of grasping hands. Everyone is reaching out to touch his shoulder to get his attention. I wonder how he feels about that; if he’s squicked by it, he isn’t showing it at all.
Awww, he gave a shout out to the First Lady….who is looking mighty fine in that violet sleeveless dress.
Now, a list of narrative examples of how “everyday people” feel the crisis:
- “the worry you wake up with” / “sleepless nights”
- “the job you thought you would retire from, that now you’ve lost”
- “the business you built your dreams upon, that’s now hanging by a thread.”
- “the college acceptance letter your child had to put back in the envelope.”
- OUCH. For some reason, that last one has the most affective impact for me, and not just because I work in academia. I think nothing incites that combination of sadness and shame like seeing the lives of your loved ones curtailed by your inability to support them.
Standing Ovation #1: “we will recover, we will rebuild and America will come back stronger than before!” Hey, it’s a pep talk now!
What I would’ve stood up for: “The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation.”
“Now if we’re honest with ourselves we’ll admit that for too long we’ve not always met these responsibilities.” Don’t tell me that wasn’t a clear Bush/Republican dig.
“I say this not to lay blame or look backwards.” Oh yes you do; don’t be coy. Let Bush and his party take credit for what they’ve wrought.
“We have lived through an era where too often short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.” OK, that last one was a pretty transparent dig. I like this!
“The surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future.” This one got applause. Yay not-to-subtle-Marxist-critique!
Re: his “agenda” for economic recovery: “it’s an agenda that begins with jobs.” This got more applause.
Standing Ovation #2: When he announces that his stimulus bill “is now law” (as if anybody in the room wasn’t aware) only a certain part of the room stands up.
Long list of the kinds of jobs this stimulus bill would create: green-sector jobs, retention of teachers in public schools, retention of police officers—in fact, a lot of it is about jobs that won’t be lost.
Why does the camera cut to the very uncomfortable Mitch McConnell (R-KY) when Obama talks about the tax credits for low-income families paying for college tuition?
“Now, I know that there are some of you in this chamber—and at home—who are skeptical about whether this will work.” (camera cuts to a smirking McCain) “And I understand that skepticism; here in Washington, we’ve all seen how quickly good intentions can turn into broken promises, wasteful spending.” How was that for an agile sympathy-suckerpunch combo? He’s all, ‘I know about disappointment, too; remember the last 8 years?’
Biden will manage an “oversight effort” on the stimulus package, apparently because “nobody messes with Joe.” Pelosi gives him a standing ovation.
Re: fixing the credit crisis: “Every American should know, that it directly affects you and your family’s well-being.” Translation: this isn’t just a hand-job to the financial sector, folks; your ass is riding on these banks as well, like it or not.
What follows is a pedantic (but comprehensive) explication of how a “credit crunch” pretty much fucks everything up.
Hmm, he’s definitely playing the populist / anti-bank card now, promising all sorts of harsh “accountability” for banks that take government funds. Some snide comments about how “those on Wall Street” might prefer to take the money with no consequences for their reckless decisions.
Standing Ovation #3: “This time [i.e., not like the first bank bailout in the fall], they will have to clearly demonstrate how taxpayer dollars result in more lending for the American taxpayer.” Pelosi shoots right out of her seat for this one. Lieberman claps soberly…the backstabbing traitor.
Standing Ovation #4: [right after the previous one] “This time, this time, CEOs won’t be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks, or buy fancy drapes, or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over.” That last one was clearly a reference to that zillionaire that was recently accused of massive fraud à la Madoff.
Standing Ovation #5: [not 10 seconds later!] He repeats the “doing something is better than nothing” argument (which is specious, but efficient), implying that inaction could result in a stalled economy for a decade. “That would be worse for our deficit, worse for business, worse for you, and worse for the next generation and I refuse to let that happen.
Re: the unpopularity of helping banks after they’ve fucked things up for themselves: “I promise you: I get it!”
“We cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment.” WHERE WERE YOU 7 ½ YEARS AGO?!
Standing Ovation #6: “I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single wall street executive…but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved but still can’t get a mortgage.” Thunderous applause. Go anti-finance-sector sentiment! If this weren’t a thoroughly capitalist country, you might call this capitalist-baiting. Maybe banker-baiting.
“we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession.” Great line.
Standing Ovation #7: call to finally reform market regulation. Was anyone seated for that?
Now he’s talking about his upcoming budget. What’ll be in it?
Another Bush/Republican dig: “…the stark reality of what we’ve inherited: a trillion-dollar deficit, a financial crisis, and a costly recession.” Translation: I’m doing what I can with this mess, but if you want to blame someone for this, look into the last 8 years.
Standing Ovation #8: A list of examples of how America has historically launched large state projects during times of upheaval. The last one got the ovation:
- railroad construction during civil war
- public high school system emerging from turmoil of industrial revolution
- during world wars, the creation of the GI bill, and thus “the creation of the largest middle class in history”
“In each case government didn’t supplant private enterprise, it catalyzed private enterprise.” True, although there’s always the specter of nationalization.
Standing Ovation #9: While there will be cutbacks in the budget, there will be significant investment in:
- energy
- health care
- education
HELLZ YES. Pelosi jumped up like her seat was hooked up to a 3,000 volt wire.
Standing Ovation #10: complains that all of the recent innovation in “green technology” has been happening overseas, and that he is committed to reasserting America’s predominance: “We will lead again.”
Standing Ovation #11: “More renewable energy in America.” Does this require a standing O? Is it really that surprising / groundbreaking?
Standing Ovation #12: “I believe that the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”
Dude, this is like a Catholic mass! An endless series of standing up and sitting down. If they start kneeling, they’ll have to burn some incense.
Standing Ovation #13: “we can no longer afford to put health care on hold. It’s time.” [camera cuts to Hilary Clinton]
Standing Ovation #14: mention of passing of the S-CHIP bill days into the new administration. Pelosi jumps out of her seat before he finishes the sentence.
Standing Ovation #15: “seeking a cure for cancer in our time.”
He’s starting a planning committee for health care reform next week
- Electronic charts, new technologies to reduce cost
- Preventative medicine
- Broader health-care options (read: near-universal)
“Nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt called for reform, the cost of health care has weighed down our economy and our conscience.” Nice turn of phrase there.
Standing Ovation #16: “Health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.” Does this mean we’ll see something before next xmas?
Now, on to education
“a good education is not just a pathway to opportunity, it is a prerequisite.” Interesting point.
Some depressing statistics of education levels and drop-out rates in high school and college.
Standing Ovation #17: that every person has access to a complete and comprehensive education (does this mean my future as a prof is secure?) Pelosi again jumps out of her seat. I feel like I should get her a pair of pom-poms.
He calls on every American to commit to at least one year of college or higher education, including community college / vocational training. OK, now he’s pandering directly to the educators!
Standing Ovation #18: “Dropping out of high school is not an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.” And Fox, in its endless racial sensitivity, cuts immediately to the row of black legislators. “Of course! Black people drop out of high school a lot, right? Let’s get a reaction shot from some highly-educated black people!”
It’s a bit of a surprising move to link education to patriotism—at least in America.
Standing Ovation #19: A new education goal: by 2020, the US will have the largest proportion of college graduates in the world.
Obama promises support for higher education training if you volunteer in the community, serve the country (militarily?)
Standing Ovation #20: Asks that the education bill be named after Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Ted Kennedy (D-MS).
Speaks about the “importance of parents” to a child’s education, although the phrasing makes it sound like a subtle reproach (i.e. it’s not the government’s job to tell your kid to turn off the TV and do his/her homework).
Standing Ovation #21: “Responsibility for our children’s education must begin at home. That is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue; that’s an American issue.”
Standing Ovation #22: underlines the importance of not passing to “our children” a debt that they can’t pay. For once, the Republicans in the room seem as enthusiastic as the Democrats
Obama even jokes about it after the ovation: “See? I know we can get some consensus in here.”
Sorta-Standing Ovation #23: Only this phrase: “With the deficit we inherited…” then Obama smirks as only the Dems stand up and clap. Chuck Schumer lucks positively delighted.
Claims that stimulus bill was passed without earmarks (technically correct, although ask him about the Omnibus bill coming down the pipe).
Reminds everyone that he had recently pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.
Claims that his budgeting committee has already identified “2 trillion in savings in the next decade.” I’d be curious to see those numbers.
- End educational programs “that don’t work”
- Terminate agriculture funding for the large corporations “that don’t need it” (what about small farming?)
- No more “no-bid contracts”, which have “wasted billions in Iraq” (this got a mini-standing ovation from the centre of the house)
- Reform military acquisitions “so that we’re not paying for cold-war-era weapons we don’t use.”
- Remove “waste, fraud and abuse” in the medicare system (i.e., for seniors)
- “balance” the tax code by ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource their labor overseas.
Standing Ovation #24: see the last point in the list above.
This is called a pre-buttal: “You will probably hear from other sources that rolling back these tax cuts constitutes a massive tax increase on the American people…” deflate criticism before it’s articulated.
Standing Ovation #25: if you make less than $250,000 (“a quarter million,” he repeats to emphasize its size), your taxes will not increase “by a single dime.” The Republicans are mostly slow to stand up, but they eventually do.
Standing Ovation #26: “In fact, the recovery plan (stimulus bill) provides a tax cut—that’s right, a tax cut!—for 95% of working families. And, by the way, these checks are on the way.”
We must address the growing cost of Medicare and Social Security (by “we” he means Americans; I’m just a spectator caught in the consequences).
Calls for tax-free universal savings accounts “for all Americans.” (applause)
“Finally, because we’re also suffering from a deficit of trust…” he wants to restore the feeling of transparency and honesty to the budget process…
Standing Ovation #27: “…and for the first time, that includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven years, we’ve been a nation at war, no longer will we hide it’s price!” You can’t not stand up to that, right?
Announces intention to “review” the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not concrete details.
Standing Ovation #28: nonetheless, commits to making a plan that “responsibly ends this war.”
Shows his hawkish / tough side, claims that he’ll work on the effort in Afghanistan / Pakistan to “defeat Al Qaeda and combat extremism.”
Standing Ovation #29: “I will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people from safe havens half way around the world. We will not allow it!” Interesting shift from first person singular to plural.
Addresses himself to the soldiers on the field “and to the families that bear the quiet burden of their absence.” Again, nice turn of phrase.
Standing Ovation #30: “We honor your service, we are inspired by your sacrifice and you have our unyielding support.” Cut to a scene of some chubby politician shaking the hand of a young military officer conveniently located in the crowd.
Claims that new budget increases the numbers of soldiers and marines
Standing Ovation #31: expanded pay and benefits for veterans.
“There’s no force more powerful than the example of America.” Huh. I don’t know about that…
Standing Ovation #32: references the requested closing of Guantanamo Bay detention center. “Because living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger.”
Standing Ovation #33: “that is why I can stand here tonight and say with out exception or equivocation that the United States of American does not torture. We can make that commitment here tonight.” The last phrase implies pretty heavily that, under the Bush administration, we probably did.
Discusses the importance of foreign policy
“we can no longer shun the discussion table”
mentions Middle East convoy (Holbrooke) assigned for Gaza conflict
mentions need for international co-operation for fixing the economic crisis.
Insists on this time as “the crossroads of history,” where the present is stretched out into historical time.
Standing Ovation #34: in honor of Richard Abbas (sitting in the audience), a Florida banker that cashed out of his company, took a huge bonus, and then distributed the cash to his employees without saying anything to the press. The ovation was hesitant at first, but picked up speed.
Mentions Greensburg, Kansas, which was completely destroyed by a tornado and is now being re-built as a clean-energy city.
Standing Ovation #35: quotes the words of Ty’Sheoma Bethea (in the audience, next to the First Lady), a student in a “hopeless” public school in NC, who wrote a letter to congress asking for help. “We’re not quitters.”
Moves to closing gestures, about how these people (the three examples preceding) should inspire “us” (legislators, but also the general public) to work for the nation.
“I know…look, I know that we haven’t agreed on every issue—thus far.” (laughter from the crowd, as he looks at the Republicans.”
Standing Ovation #36: “…but I also know that every American who is sitting here tonight loves this country and wants it to succeed.”
“That must be the starting point for every debate we have in the coming months, and where we return after those debates are done. That is the foundation on which the American people expect us to build common ground.” So, patriotism as political engagement quelconque? (c.f. Agamben)
of course, no American “no church in this state” speech can end without “God bless America.” Sigh.

My furry roommate

2009-02-24T21:20:00.000+01:00

Remember back in the fall, when I saw a mouse in my kitchen and finally decided to buy a mousetrap? [LINK] Well, the mouse mysteriously stopped showing up as soon as I brought the mousetrap home, so I cleaned my kitchen of any edible items and called a unilateral truce.

Then, tonight, he scuttled across my kitchen floor. Again. With all the lights on, in the early evening. He didn’t even have the decency to lurk about in the dark.

And so here I am, preparing the mousetrap again. I have no cheese left in my fridge, so I attached a bit of red cabbage to the trap, as if that’s going to work.

Back in the Saddle, musically

2009-02-23T13:02:00.000+01:00

Etude 007: Reggaetón Edition

Yay! Back in the saddle, so to speak. After work, I finally got around to making some music again. It’s just a short 2-minute loop with some reggaetón samples that a friend sent me, but I was just happy to have produced something after more than a month of radio silence.

Anyway, I had crashed at a friend’s place the night before, so I got up at 10h00, fell back asleep, woke up again at 10h30, and finally got myself out the door. I was in no shape to go directly to work, so I had to climb on my bike and pedal my way around parc Buttes-Chaumont and make my way over to my place for a hasty shower and breakfast.

I got to work a bit late, but my boss seemed to forgive me, and my day was otherwise pretty unexciting. I headed home and set about making a fish salad out of those two roasted sea bass that I had left over from the night before. It actually worked out pretty well. I made some mayo from scratch with some good olive oil, an egg, lime juice, mustard and a clove of garlic (and with the help of a good hand blender, mind you). From there, I finely diced some onions, fennel, turnip, and carrots along with some of the fennel greens. I took the fish and carefully disassembled them, pulling the flesh off the skeleton without taking too many pin-bones with it; I flaked the flesh with a fork and removed any bones I could find, and then I mixed the fish in the veggies and added the mayo. Not bad, really.

I also made a roasted cauliflower soup, which was “improved” by adding a small container’s worth of crème fraîche. See? It’s healthy, because there’s vegetables in it…despite the pound of cream.

My evening was spent mostly dealing with the banalities of preparing application dossiers for fellowships and dealing with pedagogical issues, but before going to bed I decided to stay up and make a bit of music. It’s been almost a month since I had resolved to make something—anything—musical at least once every couple of days, so tonight was my night to get back to it.

The Four-Night Weekend, Part 4: The Postponed Date

2009-02-22T22:41:00.001+01:00

Well, today was short but not entirely quiet. Since I had returned home at about 10h00 in the morning, I let myself sleep into the early afternoon (15h00) and then got up and went about blogging my little heart out. I managed to catch up on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so I was doing pretty well. I also took care of a few bits of school-related housekeeping and then set about making some parsley-flavored rice and roast fish. Tasty! I roasted all three of the fish, since they were beginning to get old. I only ate one, and I put the other two in the fridge, thinking I might make some sort of fish salad out of them tomorrow.

I got a call from the guy that I met on Thursday (with whom I was supposed to have a hot date last night, but it didn’t work out) and he invited me over to his place for some drinks. We ended up staying up really late chatting and such, so I crashed at his place, thinking foolishly that I would wake up early enough to swing by home before going to work.

The Four-Night Weekend, Part 3: Epic Night

2009-02-21T18:32:00.000+01:00

Woo. This was an epic night. Here’s what my social calendar looked like for today:

17h: meet Bob & Donna for drinks
20h: go to a friend’s place to play poker with some of the UofC doctoral students
23h: go to On Cherche Encore… [LINK] to pay a visit to DJ Aclank, who had a minimal techno event going on (he was at Le Pin Up the night before and invited me to come out).
Sometime between this thing and the next: meet up with the guy I met last Thursday for some drinks somewhere
1h: head to Le Java for the 1-year anniversary of the Mona night (the guy who runs it is the new boyfriend of a good friend of mine, so he invited me and put me on the list)
2h: catch Roman Flugel spinning at Social Club (previously, Le Triptyque)
4h: go to Le Glam to catch my buddies HD Project and Timid Boy at a sorta-after-hours event that runs from 4h – 10h.

The schedule was pretty much impossible to keep, but I think I did pretty well for myself. After spending the afternoon sleeping in and then working on blogging and the reading assignment for my English students, I headed out at around 17h00 to begin my long night. Here’s how my 17-hour marathon went down:

18h: drinks with Bob & Donna

Met Bob and Donna and two of their friends for drinks at Café des Anges near Bastille. Conversation was nice and it was cool to finally hang out with them outside of the usual Berlin-nightclub contexts. It was great to get their perspective on the clubbing establishments that I know here in Paris. However, I had forgotten my cell phone at home, which meant that I had to leave early to get the phone and make it over to my friend’s house. Boo!

20h: poker night at friend’s place.

I got to her place a bit late, after biking frantically home and then back over there. I bought two bottles of wine, thinking everyone would share, but everyone brought their own drinks, so I ended up finishing two bottles on my own. Oh, and I had forgotten to eat dinner. So by the time I left here, I could barely form complete sentences. However, I did win the poker game, and left 20€ richer. So there.

0h30: On Cherche Encore… to visit DJs Aclank and PanPan

I can barely remember how I got to On Cherche Encore…, but I know that I was pretty trashed and doing my best to hold myself together. I deliberately took the long route to get to the bar from the subway station, letting the cold air calm me down a bit. I managed to appear sober enough to make it into the bar and say hi to the DJs, where I stupidly ordered a mojito. It was tasty, but it was too close on the heels of all that wine and I began to feel not just drunk but a bit ill.

2h30: Date with hot guy (postponed, replaced with food)

I had exchanged a few messages with the hot guy I had met last Thursday and he was going to come meet me from a house party where he was, so I was hanging back and waiting for him to appear. Since I knew he would call me from the subway station, I took advantage of the moment to head out and get a bit of food in me. I needed a bit of something to absorb all of this liquor, and a kebab seemed like the right idea. I headed down to a kebab joint at the bottom of Faubourg du Temple, where I still managed to order in Turkish, despite my state. Eventually, my date called and put off our meeting until Sunday, which was fine with me; I was feeling a bit too out of it to manage courtship and flirting.

3h00: Mona one-year anniversary party @ La Java

After the kebab, I headed back to say goodbye to the DJs at On Cherche Encore, and then over to Le Java for the Mona night. Getting in on the list was a bit of a hassle and the coat check was a disaster, but the crowd inside was great fun. The music was mostly straight-up house and the crowd was largely middle-aged gay men of the skinny-and-bearded variety. It was pretty hot and sweaty, which gave the basement club a certain rave-party feel. I ran into my friend and his boyfriend, who was running the party that night. We hung out for a bit and shared some champagne, but then the love-struck couple wandered off to make out on the dancefloor. I wasn’t feeling particularly at home in the crowd (this is generally true of gay clubs for me; Berghain is the big exception) and I wanted to check out Le Java before I ran out of energy, so I headed out around 4h30. Considering that I had probably already missed Roman Flugel’s set, I cancelled the trip to Social Club and went straight to Le Glam.

5h00: Le Glam after-hours-ish night w/ HD Project and Timid Boy

I was feeling a bit more clear-headed as I left Le Java, so I decided to take a bike ride over to Le Glam, which was on the other side of the Seine. The ride over really helped, and I arrived at the club feeling pretty much sober. That soberness was slightly dented by the super-stiff vodka-tonic that the bartender served me once inside, but I was nonetheless in pretty good shape for the rest of the evening. The bar was another basement bar, with a nice layout for an after-hours place, with lots of banquette seating around several rooms that were joined by a central bar. I managed to finally catch up with HD Project, who I hadn’t seen in almost 2 years, and Timid Boy, who I hadn’t seen in at least a month. As the night/morning wore on, more people that I knew showed up from other soirées and things got pretty fun. By about 8h00 or so, the bouncers started getting antsy with the drug use going on (it’s an after-hours, after all) and began to hassle people in the toilets and toss people out. I was eventually part of the collateral damage, as a paranoid bouncer decided that I had been going to the washroom too much. Despite my protestations that that was the logical result of drinking alcohol, he wasn’t convinced and told me to get my things and leave. It was already close to the end of the evening anyway, so I asked the bouncer to give me a minute to make my goodbyes, did my rounds, and then headed off. At first I was a bit miffed that all of my friends and acquaintances reacted to the news with, “Oh that’s too bad. Bye!” I kinda expected them to at least make a token effort to help me stay at the club, especially those who were connected to the event, but I had only been one of several people being hassled tonight, so I don’t know how useful that would’ve been, anyway.

The Four-Night Weekend, Part 2: Chopped Rainbow in Crystal Fold and Le Pin Up

2009-02-20T18:09:00.000+01:00

Although I had only been lightly drunk at the height of last night, I realized this morning that I had been mixing my drinks too much. The combination of champagne, white wine, red wine and then mixed drinks gave me a splitting headache this morning.

Nonetheless, I managed to pull myself together, mix some breakfast, and then go about my day. I was a bit of a shut-in during the day, focusing on FINALLY catching up on my blogging from the previous weekend in Berlin. During a break in the intense blogging activity, I made an attempt to duplicate this dish that I’ve had a few times at Toronto-area Chinese restaurants, called “Chopped Rainbow in Crystal Fold.” Fantastic name, eh? The idea behind the dish is that you stir-fry some diced vegetables of bright and contrasting colors, toss in some spices and a bit of soy sauce, and then serve them warm on little wraps made out of lettuce leaves. The contrast of temperatures and texture had always delighted me, but I’ve never been able to find a similar dish in Chinese restaurants elsewhere.

So I improvised tonight with what I had. I chopped up a red onion, some carrots, some turnips, some potatoes, a bright red hot pepper and then sautéed them with a ton of garlic and ginger and a dash of dark soy sauce. Then, I dug out the red cabbage I had in the fridge and did my best to carefully pull out the exterior leaves intact. Although most of the leaves broke as I peeled them back, they were large enough that the fragments were the right size to fit in your hand and be wrapped around the filling. The results were pretty tasty, although the peppery taste of the raw red cabbage got to me after a while. It might be better with Napa cabbage or bok choy, although lettuce is certainly still an option.

Anyway, I headed out that night to Le Pin Up to see Fantômette spin at her monthly “Piscine” night. I had plans of leaving there a bit early and heading over to Djoon to check out Theo Parrish, since I still haven’t been to that club and I haven’t seen Parrish spin in years. Also, Bob (of Bob&Donna at PanoramaBar fame, see last weekend) was in town and planning to go out as well, so we said that we might find each other at Djoon later in the evening.

However, there was a big turnout at Le Pin Up that night, including lots of friends that I hadn’t seen in ages, so I stuck around and chatted with everyone. By the time I gave some thought to moving to Djoon, the métro had stopped running and I wasn’t too keen on biking all the way over to the Bibliothèque Mitterand area. Also, I had had several of the trademark “Bubble Pin Up” drinks, which involves champagne, vodka, and violet syrup, and which had hit me harder than I had expected…probably because my dinner had been nothing more than veggies.

Anyway, I stayed there and hung out with friends until the night ended at 4h00, and then I wandered down the street with a couple of friends and grabbed a Vélib bike and headed home.

The Four-Night Weekend, Part 1: Techno at a Swinger's Bar

2009-02-19T17:40:00.000+01:00

Wow, this was a long, long weekend. So long, in fact, that it started on Thursday.

Daytime activities were pretty banal: work, then doctoral students’ workshop, then home for a while. However, the director of the doctoral workshop was having us over for dinner that night, so I headed over there around nine to start the evening. As conversation carried on at her place, we went through two bottles of champagne and several bottles of wine (between 10 of us), so everyone was feeling a bit warm and fuzzy by the time we left.

My friend DJ Childerik and some of his friends had organized a soirée tonight at this club, l’Hôtel des Sens, which is usually a swingers club on the weekends, so I decided to go check it out. Three of my colleagues from the doctoral workshop came with me, but they left pretty quickly, once they discovered the price of drinks: 15€ for a standard mixed drink. By comparison, Le Rex charges 10€ and Berghain (in Berlin) charges about 4€. I was having some serious trouble justifying paying that much for a drink at a not-well-known club, although I suppose that explained why there was no cover to get in.

Anyway, I was actually a terrible host to my colleagues, as I arrived at the club and was immediately swept up into talking with DJ Childerik and his girlfriend, and then all of their friends. I was captivated by conversation with one friendly guy that had lived in Berlin a while ago; we talked about our favourite locations in Berlin and told stories of partying and excess. He was also really interested in my time in the Chicago and Toronto scenes, so we had a lot to talk about. I told him that the (minimal) techno scenes in Chicago and Toronto are smaller, which means less events can be organized and less big-name DJs, but also a more tight-knit community and more “underground” events in basements of homes, warehouses, artists’ studios.

Aside from Childerik, there was also Eva Kokoschka and Alyotis spinning. The sound for the evening was relatively light minimal house, which was nice to hear in this interesting space. The place is in a narrow building, spanning 5 floors in total (although the bottom floor closed tonight). There’s a smoking room in the top floor, the coat check and bathrooms in the floor below, and then a floor with the DJ booth and the bar and a dancefloor on the last floor. There weren’t all that many people there, so we ended up clustering near the DJ booth and dancing there (also, lots of people hung out in the smoking lounge, where the music was less loud and you could talk).

A friendly guy chatted with me in the bathrooms (nothing salacious, just comments on the space-age faucet they had in the bathroom), and then I saw him again a bit later at the bar. We chatted for a bit more, he asked me if I knew the DJs, he told me about the wine shop he works at, and then suddenly he was offering his drug-procuring services and pressing his business card into my hand. Kids these days; so forward!

I also got to know a nice lad that was apparently good friends of Childerik and his girlfriend. I won’t go into detail, but I’ll say that he’s cute, he works as a hairdresser, and he’s a good kisser. I eventually needed to head home and get some sleep, but we exchanged phone numbers and planned to see each other again during the weekend.

It's all about the €€€

2009-02-18T20:28:00.001+01:00

I GOT PAID, THANK YOU JEEBUS.

Well, I’m always getting paid regularly by the UofC for my assistanceship (work) money, but I’ve also been working a side-gig here in Paris as an English teacher at the Ecole des Chartes. When I first signed up, they didn’t say anything about their eccentric payment system, and then it wasn’t until the third or fourth week that I finally called them in confusion and found out that they only pay at the end of the semester. In other words, I would get all 12 weeks of pay in January. Well fuck.

But then, in January, I discovered that they only start the payment paperwork at the end of the semester, but nobody in the organization had any fucking clue how long the paperwork would take. So here you have this massive, well-funded organization, hiring foreign grad students to teach languages, and they’re making them wait nearly 6 months to get paid for their work. That seems reasonable, right?

Well, anyway, I got paid. So there.

Police and Hazing

2009-02-17T20:13:00.000+01:00

So today I managed to get a ticket while on my bike. The cops insisted that I had run a red light while crossing a bridge, although the light had just turned yellow when I had gotten to it. I might’ve tried to argue my case if I had been in Canada, but I was already unnerved by the suspicious questions they were asking me about my visa and my nationality, so I decided I didn’t want to risk being detained as a terrorist or whatever as punishment for being uppity. One of the abiding reasons why there is so much resentment against police among non-dominant folks (racial minorities, immigrants, queer folks, etc) is precisely that we often have to surrender our dignity in the interest of avoiding punitive “enforcement.”

Anyway, that smeared some shit on an otherwise pleasant day. My trip to the market was very productive (I’ll be eating tons of fish and vegetables this week) and work was fine.

But at night, as I was getting ready to go to bed, I heard a group of American-English-speaking voices singing cheerleading songs (“Everywhere we go-o / People always ask us / Whooo we a-are…”) and occasionally yelling “On your knees!” repeatedly, followed by cheering. Is there a frat hazing going on in Paris? I leaned out the window and looked down on the street and, indeed, saw some young guy on his knees, with a funnel in his mouth and his friends taking turns pouring alcohol into his gullet while taking pictures.

Way to represent American culture, guys. I can’t wait until this moved to throwing up and then toxic shock. Wheee.

Die Rückfahrt

2009-02-16T20:10:00.001+01:00

Time to return to reality, I suppose.

I got up late again (I couldn’t get to sleep last night, thanks to that afternoon nap I took), said goodbye to Florian as he left for work, and then got ready to head to the airport.

But first, I went downtown and had lunch with Janine on her lunch break, where we had a chance to catch up a bit and chat about the weekend. Apparently, she had stayed until the end of Berghain, along with her friends and Bob and Donna and their crew. Phew. I wish I could’ve stuck around.

I got to the airport and did the “early check-in” the for Lufthansa and then headed over to the central baggage desk to leave my suitcase. Of course, there was only one person working the desk, and the person at the front of the line had some sort of complicated problem, which meant that nobody else got served while the clerk slowly went about untangling the mess. Just one more person at the desk would’ve saved everyone else the 30-minute wait. Christ.

So the flight itself was fine, I got back to my place fine, and then I realized that I had absolutely nothing to eat at home. I managed to improvise with lentils and beets, but I clearly need to get more food up in this hizzouse.

Mexican-Gay-Realist-Mythological-Romance-Film

2009-02-15T19:58:00.000+01:00

Florian, bless his soul, was making fried-egg-bagel sandwiches when I got home at 16h00. He’ll make someone a great wife, I tell you.

My original plan had been to just stay awake until this evening’s activities, since falling asleep now would mess up my sleep cycles something bad. So after a sorta breakfast-lunch, I took a shower and then sat down to work on my blogging while Florian went back to his proofreading.

A few minutes later, I was asleep on the couch.

I woke up in time to get ready for our night out at the Berlinale Film Festival, although we still managed to arrive after the film had started (partially because there are two theaters with the same name at Potsdamer Platz).

The film we saw was a Mexican flick called Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo, which was one half black-and-white gritty realist nearly-dialogue-free borderline-porn about men cruising each other in dilapidated porn cinemas and bathrooms, and one half oversaturated-colour Mexicanized Orpheus myth. I’m not going to recite the plot to this 3 hour marathon, but here’s some point-form notes:

The film involves a scene where one character is fucked back to life. Seriously.
There’s some odd stuff going on with race in this film, where the two protagonist-lovers include a “pretty boy” character that is of European descent and the more knowledgeable, active, even persistent lover, and a baby-faced “innocent” character that is of mixed black ethnicity and passive, hesitant, and eventually plays the role of Persephone (i.e., dead and waiting to be saved) once the film turns into an Orpheus myth. Also, the bad guy (a jealous lover who turns into Hades during the myth) is of Native Mexican origin and has a much darker skin tone than the other two.
The camera-work was wonderful, especially in the black-and-white portion, where the silent interactions of the men cruising each other was mostly told through camera movement. Some great shots that trace people’s looks across space.
The plot was lame, the dialogue was clunky and the acting was sometimes pretty unconvincing. Considering that this film was supposed to be a sort of modernized-but-mythologized lover’s tale, I think it would’ve been better if the dialogue in the myth portion of the film had been super-stylized; it would’ve been less cringe-inducing if it seemed more like opera lyrics or Shakespearean tragedy or something.
Anyway, this flick managed to win the Best Film award at the Teddies, which is the GLBT section of the Berlinale awards. Meh.

Singles Awareness Day in Berlin

2009-02-14T18:37:00.000+01:00

Happy Valentine’s Day! Or, as I like to call it, Singles Awareness Day.

So, after getting home at around 7h00 this morning, I woke up at 15h00. 8 hours, that’s a good night’s sleep!...just in the afternoon. Anyway, Florian had been up for a while and working on proofreading a book for publication, so he took a break and we had some tea. From there, Florian got back to working on his book and I set about getting some blogging done. There was lots to catch up on.

ArtHouse TeaParty!

At around 18h00, Florian had an invitation to a “tea party” at an art gallery over in Mitte, so I tagged along with him. The theme of the event was Kinder Zoo (Children’s Zoo), so there were lots of odd and rather uncanny installations involving things child-like and animalistic.

The main piece was a table covered with birthday party napkins, paper plates, half-eaten cakes, and crayon scribbles. There were folding chairs half pushed-in at the table, as if the whole party had suddenly been taken up in the rapture during the party. Oh, and the whole thing was covered in confetti. Anyway, there was no framing device to make the difference between a normal object and “art” in this instance, so people were constantly trying to figure out whether they had the “right” to sit at the table, steal a piece a cake, or otherwise alter the scene.

There was also a “talking unicorn,” which involved a long pincer device (a “grabber”) covered in a crocheted unicorn head that opened and closed its mouth when you pressed a handle. That was kinda cool.

Florian, like a good host, introduced me to a bunch of cool and interesting people, including this one artist from Dallas (I think) who was totally fascinated with my dissertation project. Without much prompting, offered her own story about intimacy on the dancefloor, telling me that she turns from a mildly shy girl into an outgoing, risk-taking (NOT an euphemism for drug-taking) “life of the party” as soon as she’s on the dancefloor. I thought she was actually describing something interesting and pretty common: the ways in which our personality shifts based on changes in context that suggest what pleasures are available, what risks are affordable, and what rules have changed. I’d like to think that my daytime self and my nightclub self are completely continuous, but at the same time I wouldn’t be writing this dissertation if there wasn’t a oft-jarring contrast between behaviors on and off the dancefloor.

It was soon getting close to 20h00, and we had plans to meet a mutual friend (and former roommate from my Berlin summer) at a restaurant up near Florian’s place, so we dashed off to the nearest tram stop. We managed to get there in reasonable time, although our ever-punctual friend was nonetheless there waiting for us. The restaurant was called Amritsar, and it served some really, really good Indian food. Berlin can be a very…um…unpredictable place for dining out, so it’s always exciting when you find a restaurant that serves good food and good value. We ate really heartily for about 13 € a head, which is nothing compared to what you pay in Paris. They had these breads called “barata”, which were like deep-friend naan and came inflated like balloons. Tasty!

The night was still relatively early (22h00) and I wasn’t going to meet my friend Janine before about midnight or 1h00, so I headed back to Florian’s place and had some tea while watching the first episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, which actually shows some promise as a new TV series. An hour or so later, I finally started making my way to meet Janine. She was at a birthday party in an apartment over near my old place from last summer: Neukölln (or, more precisely the “Kreuzkölln” area between this neighborhood and Kreuzberg). The weather was fucking cold, so the trip over there was less than pleasant; I thought I was going to lose an ear to the cold before getting there.

Birthday Party!

The party itself was really nice, and a pleasant change of pace from the usual routine of “arrive-clubbing-sleep-depart” that is a weekend in Berlin. There were two birthday kids, who lived with four other people in this massive, 5-bedroom apartment that apparently used to be a doctor’s office / apartment. Janine and her friend (one of the birthday kids) gave me a tour of the place, which filled me with apartment-envy (this is a common experience if you live in Paris and visit Berlin). The party itself was packed with a mix of Germans, Spaniards, Italians and even an American, so the conversations were pretty multi-lingual. I managed to practice my German comprehension a bit while Janine chatted with a German friend next to me.

By about 2h30, it was time to get moving. Isabelle left with me, but she didn’t accompany me to Berghain—at least, not right away. Claiming fatigue, she decided to head home and sleep, and then get up at around 10h or 11h and come join the rest of us at Berghain. Such is the Berlin party schedule.

Berghain

So I hopped on a bus that ran straight to Ostbahnhof, and from there headed over to the club. The lineup was mercifully short, not much longer than the metal stanchions near the door, but it moved slowly. I was insanely cold by the time I got to the front.

It didn’t help that I had three profoundly drunk girls behind me in the lineup. They were drinking beer in clear sight of the bouncer (generally a good way to be refused entrance), and they were talking loudly, stumbling around and colliding with other people in line (like me). However, they were doing all of this in German, and so they got in without any trouble. I had been aware that appearing to be a foreigner / tourist is usually a strike against you at the door, but I didn’t realize that appearing German actually got you so much leniency. I would’ve presumed that no messily drunk person gets into Berghain, regardless of language or ethnicity.

4h00-5h00: Damián Schwartz live

I got up to Pano just as Dinky was finishing her set, so I only heard her final track. It sounded like it had been a good set, but I wasn’t too bummed, since I’ve seen her spin numerous times before. By the time I had gotten a drink, Damien Schwartz had started his live set.

Schwartz’s live set sounded pretty good, but it wasn’t really a proper live set. I could see from where I was that he mostly had complete tracks loaded into Ableton Live, and then he had a few “DJ Tool”-type loops (simple bass kicks, etc) that he used to suture them together. It made for good music, but it sounded like a really short vinyl set, rather than a live set. I imagine I’d feel a bit cheated if I was a promoter, since the idea behind live sets is that they only last 1 hour: they take a lot of work to prepare from scratch, and they require a lot of intense concentration during performance. I’ve become more and more sensitive to this issue with live sets ever since Fantômette pointed it out to me a few weeks ago.

Near the end of the set, my two Frenchy friends from London (let’s call them Bob and Donna) arrived. They had been at Watergate to see M.A.N.D.Y. and Craig Richards and others, but they said that the sets had been crap, so they came to join me over here. Yay! They’re always fun to have around.

The bathrooms upstairs were still under construction, so everyone was forced to use the bathrooms on the Berghain floor, which tends to be rather “rich” in gay men having sex in the bathroom stalls. Good times, good times.

5h00-9h00: Matthew Styles

Overall a very good set. He leaned heavily on tracks that had more active, mobile, rhythmically complex bass lines (especially bass kicks that are pitched and occur on more than just the 4 main beats of every bar), which is totally what I like about the “Berlin minimal” sound. The set started really, really well, but it sort of flattened out in the latter 2 hours; there wasn’t as much of a shape to the set and I felt like he had gone through his best tracks at the beginning.

The Story of the Two Maris: So this guy stops me in a hallway and says, “Hey, we know each other; you know Mari, right?” Now, that’s the name of one of my roommates from this summer, so I was replied, “Yes, sure!” But I apologized and admitted that I didn’t recognize him. He said that we had met before at previous nights out. Then, he said that Mari lived in Lichtenberg now, which made absolutely no sense to me, since she had moved to NYC at the end of last summer. So I told him that we were probably talking about different Maris, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was totally certain that we both knew the same woman and that that made us friends. I eventually acquiesced, said it was nice to meet a friend of Mari’s, and moved on—but I was impressed at how he had been aggressively recruiting me to his intimate world. There’s something really interesting about these scenes of insistent friendliness, like it was trying to conjure into existence an intimate relationship from scratch.

Random friendly dude: Next to me on the dancefloor, near the DJ booth in Panorama Bar, there is a guy in a white tank-top, slightly stocky build, a fauxhawk and glitter on his cheekbones. He makes eye contact with me while we’re dancing next to each other, and we spend a moment mirroring each other’s gestures: fist pumping, finger pointing, etc. After a minute or so, he grabs his beer, has a swig, and then offers it to me. I grab it and say thanks, and he leans in and says “Trinken ist wichtig!” (“Drinking is important!”) and keeps on dancing. About 4 hours later, I’ll offer him my drink and say the same thing back to him.

9h00-13h00: Boris / 8h00-end: André Galuzzi

I know that he has a pretty ardent following here, but I just couldn’t get into the set. He does what he does well and with lots of skill, but his preference for noisy and vocal-heavy house left me cold. If the sound had been closer to microhouse or some other minimalist strain of house, I think I would’ve liked it more. Nonetheless, it kept me dancing. On the other hand, I went downstairs for a while to watch André Galuzzi, who’s set was really good. His style was strictly on the “techno” side of the “minimal” genre, but it wasn’t as pounding and thick-textured as most of the stuff one usually hears in the Berghain room.

The friendly and talkative guy that I had met last night through Bob and Donna shows up during this set and hangs out with me for a while. He loves Boris’s set, so I leave him to it while I check out Galuzzi downstairs. In the meanwhile, Bob and Donna had gone home for a nap, to come pack for Kiki’s set at 13h00. I had told them that I better see them at 13h00 or else.

As I passed through the smoking area between the two floors, these two boys from Bavaria struck up conversation with me. One had long blonde bangs over one of his blue eyes, a small lip ring, black cargo pants, and heavy yellow boots. The other had similar pants and shoes, but he had a non-spiked Mohawk and a tongue piercing. They both appeared to be feeing very good (read: high) and I guess they wanted to make new friends. The two of them actually made a great effort sustain conversation with me while I struggled to express myself in German. Another example of persistent friendliness, I guess. They weren’t being as insistent as the other guy, but they were really committed to staying in the scene of the conversation, despite the awkward pauses as I tried to speak.

I think I saw them again briefly later in the afternoon, but that was about it.

13h00-17h00: Kiki

Great set. Good track selection, great pacing within the set. The set was heavier in style and texture than what I’ve heard from him in the past, but nonetheless there was fineness and sharpness to the sound that really pleased me. As usual, I think it had to do with my preference for a sound with fewer active elements, a strong bass, and more intricate activity in the upper-mid / treble range.

Ellen Allien, a DJ and also the label boss for bpitchcontrol, was totally trashed, again. She materialized next to me as Kiki was spinning, and soon she had taken off her bra and was swinging it around over her head. Then she and some friend of hers decided to roll around on the ground…at Berghain. Then, at some point, she showered everyone around her with beer. That woman is quite the party animal.

Bob and Donna reappeared shortly after Kiki started, and Janine finally showed up around 13h45. I was going to leave at 14h00, but instead I stayed on until 15h00 to spend a bit more time with her. She introduced me to her Swedish buddy and a German girlfriend, who exemplified the current look in Berlin of oversized 70’s secretary-glasses and super-high waists. I also got to introduce Janine and her crew to Bob and Donna and their crew of friends, and so two of my worlds finally met.

Janine was excited to discover that Kiki was actually Finnish, and so she cornered him after his set to practice her Finnish with him. I was surprised to discover that he was recently married to a woman. I totally had him pegged as queer a 3$ bill. *shrug*

So I finally left at around 15h00, despite Janine’s protestations. Janine walked me to the coat check, and from there I headed out. It was snowing, which actually sucked some of the cold out of the air. Nonetheless, I decided that I deserved to take a cab back to Florian’s place. I earned it, dammit.

17h00-end: Oliver Deutschmann

Wasn’t there, but apparently his set was good.

Der Beginn des Berlinurlaubs

2009-02-13T15:38:00.001+01:00

I wasn’t able to get a later flight when I booked my tickets, so this morning I found myself getting up at 5h00 to leave my place at 6h00 to get to the airport around 7h30 to get to the gate around 8h00 for a flight at 9h20.

However, all of this was complicated by the weather. The weather forecasters had been calling for snow overnight in Paris, but there wasn’t any when I got up in the morning and looked out the window, so I thought “great! No delays!” and got dressed. By the time I was outside with my luggage, it had begun to snow in big, wet flakes.

By the time I got to the airport, the snow was falling enough for the French people around me to start calling it a “snow storm,” although most Canadians would call that just “snow.” The accumulation was not much more than an inch, but the Charles de Gaulle airport doesn’t have the equipment or the experience to handle substantial snowfall. So, as I was waiting at the gate where all the Lufthansa planes were taking off, I listened to the announcements that first delayed nearly all flights by 20 minutes, than 40 minutes, than 50 minutes. Then, the flights to Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, and Munich were cancelled. At that point, I was getting nervous that I wouldn’t make it to Berlin at all. Finally, at around 9h50, they started calling our flight to board. Phew.

Arrival and Lunch

I landed in Berlin somewhere around noon and made my way over to the apartment of my lovely host, Florian. The lucky bastard has this great apartment in Prenzlauer Berg with a view over the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and easily three times the size of what I have in Paris. I was overcome with apartment-envy.

Anyway, we hung out for a while at his apartment and had some tea (lapsang souchong, my favorite!). From there, we wandered over to a nearby Asian grocery store to buy some food supplies, and then we stopped in a Chinese dumpling restaurant for a BIG pile of dumplings. I think we ate 40 little potsticker dumplings. So tasty.

So we groaned our way out of there and stopped at the LIDL grocery store for a few more things, and then headed back to his place. We spent a bit more time drinking tea and showing each other our music collections (NOT an euphemism for anything salacious), and then it was time for me to get ready for my night out.

Off for drinks and dinner

Another friend of mine, a French girl living here in Berlin, had suggested going out for dinner, which had the advantage of giving my host some peace and quiet for the copyediting work he had to get done this weekend. She was still at an after-work round of drinks—for privacy’s sake, let’s call her Janine—so I waited around at Florian’s place for a little while and then headed out at around midnight. It was fucking cold that night in Berlin, but the tram came quickly and I was on my way to meet Janine soon after. On the way over on the tram, two girls sat near me and spoke French to each other (there are a LOT of Frenchies in Berlin these days). They decided they wanted a photograph of themselves, so they eventually leaned across the aisle of the tram and asked me to take a picture (in German). I said sure (in German) and went about taking the picture, but when the first shot didn’t quite work, I said, “Wait! That didn’t come out right,” in French. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before the girls started laughing, which I think registered that ambivalent moment when you’re comforted to encounter something familiar, but disappointed that you’ve traveled this far just to be surrounded by what you were trying to escape by traveling. As I’ve said, there are a LOT of Frenchies in Berlin these days.

I finally made it to a bar imaginatively named “Treffpunkt” (meeting place) on Friedrichstraße, where Janine was still having drinks with her co-workers. They were mostly a friendly bunch, so I was able to chat with other people at the table when my friend needed to spend some “friend time” with another co-worker. On the suggestion of someone else from the table, I ordered the Riesenkohlrouladen, which was a sort of fluffy meatloaf wrapped in cabbage and boiled. Yes, I was eating proper German food tonight.

As I was eating, I struck up a conversation with a young British lad next to me with massive double-0-gauge ear piercings. Or, to be more precise, he struck up conversation with me by saying, “I really like your earrings, man.” As those of you who have seen me in person (or by photo) since about 2003 or so, I have 6-gauge captive-bead earrings, which is about the thickness of a pencil and takes the shape the Greek omega sign (Ω) with a bead held between the two arms to close the circle.

So this guy just loved my piercings. He commented on how well they were proportioned to my face, how nice the earrings looked, how much they appeared as a natural extension of me, and so on. Perhaps most touchingly, he said that I looked really good with them in.

Of course I returned the compliment on his piercings. They were well beyond the size that I would’ve done with my own earlobes, but they did suit his longer and more narrow face. But I should also admit that the exchange wasn’t completely symmetrical: I wasn’t exactly raving about his piercings the way he did, and I wasn’t moved to start the exchange of compliments in the first place. But I suppose that a precise mirroring of his kind words would’ve seemed disingenuous anyway. Everybody knows that a compliment is like a gift: it creates a feeling of obligation to reciprocate.

Anyway, what was interesting about this exchange is that we started off talking about how much we liked each other’s piercings, migrated to talk about how having a visible body modification modifies how you do or don’t fit into the world around you, and finally finished with a discussion of his lesbian sister and stories of my unpleasant first years of undergrad in the isolated, conservative college town of Bloomington, IN. And at the end of the conversation, we shook hands and went our separate ways, not likely to meet again. This is the sort of thing I might include at the end of my dissertation, as an example of how moments of passing, casual intimacy are possible in contexts outside of the dancefloor. Yay, dissertation!

To the Berghain Kantine

Right, back to the story of tonight. Janine decided she was too tired to join me for a night out tonight, but that she would join me for sure tomorrow for a big night of partying. This was OK, since my two French-but-living-in-London friends were in town as well and joining me. The plan was to meet at the warm-up party going on in the Berghain Kantine (the old worker’s canteen next to the power plant that is now Berghain), so I made my way over slowly. Even though it was a warm-up party, I felt terribly, unfashionably early, coming to Berghain at midnight.

Amusingly enough, there was already a lineup outside of the main doors of the club, as clubgoers concerned with getting rejected by Berghain’s famous doormen decided to take advantage of the tendency to be less picky at the beginning of the night. On the other hand, the warm-up party—which was supposed to have started at 10 or 11pm—was practically empty. I grabbed a beer and sat myself in a corner on a comfortable chair and waited for my friends to arrive.

The music was being provided by a tag-team of 3 Berghain resident DJs, including Prosumer, Tama Sumo, and Steffi. They would each put down 4 or 5 tracks, and then hand the decks over to the next person, so there was a nice variety in sound without the set feeling incoherent or erratic. It was mostly minimal house of the light and subtle kind, although Steffi seemed to push things in a harder and more techno-y direction when she was at the tables. Regardless, it was good fun and a great way to get the night started while other folks were lined up outside, waiting to get into Panorama Bar.

My friends eventually showed up and we spent a few minutes complaining about air travel and weather delays before taking to the dancefloor. One of the two had just decided to start a record label in the UK with a partner, so I was excited to talk with her about what she’s doing to get it off the ground, what her plans were, etc.

They introduced me to another French guy that they knew, who lives here in Berlin at the moment. I’ve definitely seen him around at the Berlin clubs this summer and he recognized me as well, as his first question was, “You live in Berlin, too, right?” See? I do party in Berlin a lot. Anyway, he was nearly as talkative a person as I am, so we spent a good long while chatting about everything and nothing until he was distracted by a pretty girl with blonde curly hair. Priorities!

I’ll admit that I had him completely pegged as queer, but that may be due to the contexts in which I see him (i.e., only at Berghain). Regardless, it’s always good to make new friends, no?

At some point around 3h00, this thin guy in a body stocking decorated with ruffles to resemble a dog's ears and tail, holding a suitcase, appeared standing on the bar. The stocking covered his face, too, so he was this faceless dog-person thing with a suitcase. After standing on the bar for a while and striking a few poses, he made his way over to a stage-like area in the corner of the bar (where we were sitting) and started a performance that was synced to some video projected behind him of himself walking through forests. It's hard to make out a narrative from the whole performance, but he danced around in a jerky fashion, with gestures that implied distress or confusion. After a while, he disappeared behind the screen and came out in a plain white body stocking without any decoration. He picked up the suitcase, opened it up, and produced a pair of high heels, a wrap dress, a wig and a microphone. He puts all of this on and strikes a few poses, continues to dance spastically, and then bows. Thunderous applause. I'm left a bit confused.

Into Panorama Bar

By about 4am, we decided that it was time to make our way over to Berghain proper (or to Panorama Bar, to be precise). As we were heading out from the Kantine, I muttered under my breath to my friends, “You go ahead and hit the door as a couple. I’ll follow you as a single.” This sort of de-grouping has become something of a second nature to me now, at least for getting into Berlin clubs, where they often don’t like groups.

In retrospect, this was a stupid move. There was no line anymore in front of the club (one of the benefits of a Friday night with impossibly cold temperatures), so the bouncer must’ve seen us leave the Kantine as a group. I know that the bouncers here have refused entry to people that they thought were lying about the size of their group, so I got nervous when my friends said that they were a couple and the bouncer said, “Oh really? There’s only two of you?” He asked them two more times, and then sent them in. Then he looked at me and said, “How many are you?” Seeing as I was literally the only person standing at the door, it was obvious that he knew that we were really all together. On top of this, this bouncer was one that rarely worked the door when I was coming here weekly in the summer, so there was no certainty that he recognized me as a regular. At that point I had no option but to stick to my story, so I said that I was all alone. “Alone?” he said, unbelieving. “Alone,” I said, quietly panicking.

He motioned for me to wait at the door for a moment, which elicited a sinking feeling in my stomach. I’ve seen this before at Berghain. The bouncer says “wait over here,” lets in a few more people, and then finally says “no.” I could see that there were security personnel free on the inside to frisk me, so he wasn’t holding me at the door for any other reason than to either a) say no; or b) fuck with me.

After 15 excruciating seconds, he finally went with option b. He waved me in and, as I passed him, I muttered my usual “Dankeschön,” and he started to chuckle. Asshole.

In sharp contrast, the bouncer doing the security check was none other than the American guy that I’ve chatted with before and that has let me skip the line on a few occasions. He gave me a really quick once-over and sent me in.

One of the two members of Pigon was spinning when we got upstairs (I think it was RNDM, but it might’ve been Efdemin), but his set was over shortly after we got upstairs.

The next set was by Patrice Scott, a Detroit-based American DJ that I hadn’t heard of before. His set was very much reminiscent of old-fashioned Detroit techno; although the tempo was in keeping with the slightly more relaxed speeds of Berlin-style “minimal,” the sound was a lot heavier and the textures were thicker.

Anyway, I have to admit that I wasn’t paying as much attention as I could’ve, because I started feeling rather odd. I was having a hard time concentrating, my eyes were constantly half-lidded, and felt groggy and sluggish. At first I thought that maybe the beer was hitting me harder than it normally does, so I switched to water. But nothing changed. So then I began to wonder if someone had slipped something in my drink.

Then, my friends told me that they were going to leave, because they had been up since 6h00 the previous morning. At that point I suddenly realized what was wrong with me: I was tired. I had gotten up at 5h30 Friday morning, traveled to Berlin, had an otherwise busy day, and it’s now more than 24 hours later. So no surprise that I was feeling out of it.

Anyway, I stayed on for a bit longer and tried to muster up some more energy, but then finally I decided to cut my losses and save myself for Saturday night. I left at around 6h30 and got back to Florian’s place around 7h00, where I did my best not to wake my gracious host.

What happened to Thursday?

2009-02-12T16:32:00.000+01:00

Well, I normally write my blog notes the day after, and the day after Thursday was a loooooong Friday. Since today’s events weren’t particularly enthralling, let’s just skip to Friday, OK?

Beef Bourguignon, Baby!

2009-02-11T22:25:00.000+01:00

Sometime last week, at the height of my flu/cold/plague, I bought a couple of bottles from the little corner shop on my street. The more expensive one, a 1998 bordeaux at 6€, turned out to be corked. Even without the use of my olfactory senses, I could tell that this wine was totally undrinkable. So I put it aside and lurched back downstairs the next day and asked to replace the bottle. The shop owner insisted that I had just picked a “bad quality” wine, and told me to pick another bottle of similar value. So I did, and that bottle was corked, too. I was too sick and tired to go back down and fight him over it, so I left the bottle in the fridge overnight with a ball of plastic wrap (this is a trick for removing the “corked” taste that sometimes works) and waited for it to mellow out. It was still undrinkable the day after, but it was probably usable for boeuf bourguignon, so I left it in the fridge and waited for a good day to make that most famous French stew.

Tonight, on the way home, I decided to finally make the boeuf bourguignon. It was a relatively simple affair. I stopped at a grocery store and bought a pot au feu (“stew”) packet, which comes with a lot of leeks, a lot of carrots, and a bit of celery, one onion, and one turnip. Personally, I would’ve used more onion, but I couldn’t complain with the convenient packaging. I also picked up a pack of stewing beef, which here is helpfully labeled “bourguignon,” because what other thing would you make with cheap beef? At least, that’s what I assumed the French packagers were thinking when they decided to label it so. I also bought some candy, but that’s neither here nor there. Moving along…

So I stopped to get some bread at my bakery, and then it was time to make the bourguignon. I’ve written about the recipe here before, but I realize now that I never gave an actual recipe, so here it is. There are many, many possible versions of this, and this is the simplest version I’ve done so far, and it turned out EXCELLENT.

Ingredients

500 g. of stewing beef (approximately), but in large chunks (note, the more chewy connective tissue the better; it’ll all dissolve into the sauce)
1 onion (or maybe more)
6 medium-sized carrots
4 leeks (whites and a bit of the green)
1 large turnip
1 stick of celery
1-2 bay leaves
several sprigs of fresh thyme
rosemary (optional; I just had it kicking around)
4-5 cloves of garlic
a bottle of wine
some water and/or stock
olive oil
a few tablespoons of flour

Instructions

Prepare all your vegetables first. The leeks always have grit between the layers, so start by cutting them length-wise, and then crosswise into half-moons about 1cm long. Put them in a large bowl with a lot of water and separate the layers of leeks with your fingers, leaving them to float to the top and release their grit.
Dice the onion and celery, and place to one side. Peel and dice the turnip and place with the onion.
Peel and dice about 2 carrots and place with the onion and turnip, but also peel the rest of them and cut them into relatively large rounds.
Peel and mince the garlic as finely as possible. Put to one side.
Finally, get a large stock-pot or dutch oven and place it over medium heat. Add enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pot to a depth of a few millimeters.
One the oil is good and hot, CAREFULLY place the pieces of meat into the pot with a pair of tongs, taking care to leave a bit of space between them for proper cooking.
WAIT. The meat will probably stick to the bottom of the pan and that’s what you want. You need to wait for the meat to caramelize to the bottom of the pan and develop a crust, so give it at least 2 minutes. Then, test by giving the meat a gentle pull with your tongs. When they pop off the bottom of the pan with a bit of gentle pulling, turn them over and fry the other sides of the meat. It’s Ok if a few bits of the browned meat stay stuck on the pan for now.
Once all of the meat has been browned, remove the pieces from the pot and place them in a large bowl (a bowl is better than a flat dish, because the meat is going to leak a lot of molten fat and blood while you’re working on the next few steps).
Toss in the onions, celery, turnip, and the diced carrots (but not the sliced carrots) into the pot and dust lightly with salt. Mix to coat and then cover a leave over low heat for a few minutes.
When the leeks and onions are translucent and beginning to get soft, add the garlic and the rest of the carrots, mix, and leave to sweat a couple of minutes longer.
Dust the contents of the pot with a layer of flour and quickly mix. Keep mixing as the flour cooks into the oil and begins to thicken everything. When you see the flour-oil mixture beginning to really stick to the bottom of the pan, it’s time to deglaze.
Pour just a splash of wine and quickly mix. Once that’s absorbed, pour in a bit more and mix again (this method helps to avoid lumps in the sauce). After that, pour the rest of the bottle in, along with about 1 liter of water or stock.
Add about a teaspoon of salt (you can always add more later) and 4 crushed black peppercorns (or half a teaspoon of ground pepper).
Place the meat back into the mixture. If you have some potatoes kicking around the kitchen, you can wash them and throw them in here, as well.
Place over high heat until the liquid starts to boil. At that point, reduce to a simmer and cover.
Leave to simmer for at least 3 hours, preferably 4.
When the meat comes apart easily and the connective tissue has become soft, remove meat from mixture, along with the potatoes and any other bits of vegetables that are large enough to pick up with the tongs (don’t sweat the smaller veggies).
Place the remaining sauce over high heat and stir frequently, until the sauce has reduced by about half its volume and it’s thick enough to cover the back of a wooden spoon.
Return the meat to the pan, stir until coated, and then turn off the heat and leave covered for a few minutes. When the stew is cool enough to eat, serve and dig in.

Exquisite bureaucracy, storms and headaches

2009-02-09T01:34:00.001+01:00

So I think I figured out why I had this bizarre headache and toothache all day yesterday and today, but more on that in a moment.

After work, I headed over to BIULO (Bibliothèque InterUniversitaire des Langues Orientales — Inter-University Library of Oriental Languages), so that I could consult a book on Japanese nightlife (hostess bars, in particular). The book, in case you’re interested, is Nightwork, by Anne Allison.

Anyway, I’ve been to a bunch of different libraries in the past few days and I need to go to at least one more before this first round of reading is done…but this library takes the cake for antiquated bureaucracy. The library is free entry, but you have to sign up and get a library card. The library card is a piece of coloured construction paper, with your details written in by hand, and with your picture pasted on with glue like a kindergarten project.

Once you have your library card, you present it at the front desk and they keep it. In exchange, they give you a square plastic tile with a number on it. This is, apparently, the number of the “place” assigned to you in the library. It’s a small library, so by place they mean “one quarter of a wooden table.” No lamps, no desks, nothing to separate your space from the other 3 people at the table. The woman told me that she gave me a “place” for people with laptops. My dreams of an Ethernet jack were dashed upon arriving at the table. All that this special “place” had was an electrical outlet about 3 feet away from the table. Yay!

Now, for actual access to books. Nearly all of the books (aside from reference books) are kept in closed stacks, which means that you have to request the book and wait for it to come out. At the BnF (*sigh*, I can’t believe I’m thinking fondly of the BnF), you can request the book ahead of time online and have it waiting for you when you arrive at the library. If you order it during your time at the library, you do it directly from the online catalogue and it usually shows up in a few minutes. So at this library, you go sit at one of a handful of catalogue terminals (or—get this—THE CARD CATALOG) and then fill out a form IN DUPLICATE, where you have to fill out a bunch of your own details (including my mailing address!), and all of the details of the book: call number, title, author, publication year, etc. You drop this off at the receptionist and wait for the book to arrive. When it does, one of a handful of bored-looking student workers will walk the book over to your “place.”

But this is IF they bring the book to you. You see, the online catalog DOESN’T ACTUALLY RECORD THE ITEM’S STATUS, so you don’t know if the book has already been checked out, is lost, damaged, or otherwise unavailable. So there was a chance that I came all the way over here after work, opened a lending account, filled out copious paperwork to request a book, only to have a library worker return the slip to me 30 minutes later with a box checked “unavailable.” Seriously.

Thankfully, the book I needed was available, and I spent the next 3 hours or so scouring the book and getting what I needed out of it (the “abusive lover” approach to books, which you develop when you’re a doctoral student).

When I got home, I figured out why I had been having an awful headache all day yesterday and today, accompanied by a generalized toothache / tender gums. As it turns out, there was a massive low pressure system moving over northern France, and tonight the forecasters were predicting hurricane-force winds over Paris. My body has always been sensitive to abrupt changes in barometric pressure (bloody noses, headaches), but I’ve never had anything quite this excruciating.

To add to the fun, the winds themselves were indeed frighteningly strong. I’m on the top floor of my building, so I was getting the full force of the wind on my apartment. Of the three windows in my apartment, one of them is an original window from the 19th-century construction, which was creaking and pulling and rattling and otherwise threatening to burst open. Occasionally, the whole building would creak or groan, which also set my teeth on edge. And, in case I ever managed to get close to sleep, occasionally objects on the street below would tip over and tumble noisily along the street. So, it wasn’t a great night.

"You'll have to excuse me, I'm not at my best...

2009-02-08T00:46:00.000+01:00

...I've been gone for a week, I've been drunk since I left
These so-called vacations will soon be my death
I'm so sick from the drink, I need home for a rest

Ah, the sounds of Canadian frosh week. Ironically, I never had a proper Canuck-style frosh week, since I went to the US to start my university education. Anyway, I haven't been drunk for a week or anything, but boy, I've been tired.

I was still trying to recover from my cold today, and although I was actually somewhat productive on the dissertation front (I read a couple of articles), I was mostly still really out of it after everything my body had been through in the past couple of days. I was really groggy, which I tried to fix with a really strong coffee in the morning, which just made me feel oddly manic. That gave me enough energy to do the laundry, but today was a good example of how being more alert (i.e., caffeinated) doesn’t make you more efficient or effective. After finishing with the laundry and lugging it back upstairs, I decided to have a snack of cashews and some Coke Zero (I know I know, but it tastes good here! I think it’s the lack of high fructose corn syrup). I took out a bowl for the cashews, and a glass for the Coke. I poured a handful of cashews into the bowl. Then, I poured a glassful of Coke…into the bowl. With the cashews. And it took me almost 3 full seconds to realize what I had done.

It was not my most dignified moment.

Also, I developed an odd headache during the afternoon, which I first thought was about being over caffeinated, but didn’t go away when I switched to water and took a pain reliever. Oddly enough, the pain went right down into my teeth, as if I had been chewing on metal all last night or something. All of my teeth (or the gums, really) felt tender, and it was hard to chew on anything hard. Really odd…

Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève

2009-02-07T23:50:00.003+01:00

Another pretty unexciting day, although at least productive. I slept in again, felt just the slightest bit better about my cold (perhaps thanks to eating three cloves of raw garlic and drinking some very strong ginger tea last night) and set out again for a day of book-readin’ in Paris’s university libraries. This time, I went to Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève, which is right next to the Panthéon and features this lovely, high-ceilinged space with 19th-century wrought-iron arches holding up the double barrel-vault ceilings. I was regretting that I didn’t have a camera with me to take a picture of the interior, but then I realized that the library’s website has images of the arches all over the place, so I tried to pull them off the site. Unfortunately, they've all been used as background images, sliced up and merged with text overlays, so it doesn't look so good. Instead, here's a lovely picture from Flickr:

Fantastic! Anyway, the experience involved a fair bit of bureaucracy to get an access card, and then I had to order the book I wanted from the upper stacks, and then I had to circle the massive chamber for ages until I found a desk that was open so that I could sit down and finally read the book I requested.

After all of that, I left the library around 18h00 and gave some thought to making a mad dash to one of the other libraries on my list, but gave up when I stepped outside and found that it was snowing heavily. It seemed like a better idea to just go home, get some dinner, and work on some other materials that I already had at home. As I was walking back to the métro station in the snow, I noticed that everyone around me was hunched over, had hoods pulled over their heads, and looked as if they were braced for some sort of blizzard/hurricane. That’s just silly. It was snowing, but the snow was just falling straight down in big, wet flakes. You don’t hunch over and scowl at that, you enjoy the slow-motion confetti shower of white flakes, you let them give you a light coating of white, which you can then dust off with a grand gesture when you finally get to a sheltered place. If it were -15 degrees with 80km/h winds, I might be hunched over too, but Parisians were just being wusses.

But maybe I just think that because I’m Canadian.

Every Party I Didn't Attend

2009-02-06T23:04:00.001+01:00

Ugh, still feeling like ass.

I slept in until somewhere around 10am and slowly started getting myself together. Thanks to this potent cold, I seem to have lost my sense of smell, which I only realized when I made some of my Totally Awesome Smuggled In By Parents Peruvian Coffee and it tasted like warm water. Yay. My eggs tasted like Styrofoam; salty Styrofoam.

I know it’s one of those “did you know?” facts that are repeated to you in grade-school science classes, but it’s still always surprising how much the flavour of food depends on the sense of smell. Without a fully-functioning nose, all I could taste was the presence or absence of salty, sweet, sour, bitter and spicy. So my sweetened coffee was sweet and bitter, and nothing more. Later tonight, when I smeared what I knew to be extremely stinky cheese on a slice of freshly-baked baguette, all I got was the texture-contrast of the cheese against the bread, a slight bitterness from the aged cheese, and saltiness.

Interestingly enough, my appetites have been much reduced since my olfactory senses have been dampened. I don’t really think about eating anything until I feel hunger pangs and lightheadedness, and then I eat until I’m no longer uncomfortable, and I stop. There’s no joy in eating, but then there’s no desire to eat, either. I could see this working as a particularly masochistic form of appetite-suppression. Would you be willing to give up gastronomic pleasure for a more-controllable appetite? Hmm.

Anyway, back to my day. After dragging my feet (so to speak) and trying valiantly to motivate myself, I finally just threw myself in the shower and turned the water to just a little bit too cold. That did the trick. I wasn’t happy, but I was fully awake. The plan for today was to go to one of the four Paris libraries that I still need to visit to consult one of a series of books (first mentioned in the form of a strident complaint here), so I printed out the addresses of the various libraries, their hours, and the documents needed to get access to the collections.

Once I got outside, I was pretty glad I had forced myself to leave the apartment. It was a totally unseasonable day for Paris in winter, easily 10 or 12 degrees above freezing, sunny, clear skies, lightly breezy and mildly humid. It reminded me of the early days of spring in my area of Canada, which really did wonders for my mood. Also, something about it made me notice my cold symptoms less.

So I made my way over the one library that wouldn’t be open on Saturday, the library of the University of Paris — Clignancourt, which is near the end of the 4 métro line, Porte de Clignancourt (natch). I was braced for copious layers of bureaucracy at the library, but entry into the library was free and unrestricted, so I didn’t need to make a borrower’s card. I suppose if I had wanted to check out a book, I would’ve needed to get a card, but I was OK reading the book right there.

By the time I was done, it was nearly 18h00. There was another library on my list that was actually open late (till 22h00), so I headed over to the Saint-Genevieve library over in the 5th arrondissement, near the Panthéon. Alas, the library was open but the welcome desk was not, so I was sent away with an application form for the access card. Ah well, I should probably go home anyway.

So I had a long list of things I should’ve done tonight, and pretty much none of them happened, because I was still sick and my day of library-visiting had managed to somehow exhaust me. Fantômette had invited me to an interesting mini-conference on graffiti as public art, there was an event called Live Impact going on that featured a full night of live sets, my friend Molly was spinning at a before-party at Café Léopard, and there were at least a few other things going on that I can’t recall now.

As you can imagine, I had a lot of contrite emails to send out tonight, but I just couldn’t go out. I stayed dressed to go out until midnight, hoping that I would feel better, but eventually I realized that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate being immersed in loud music for 6 hours tonight, and it wouldn’t be nice for me to show up at a night club with my cold and share my microbes with everyone. Meh.

I'm back!

2009-02-05T23:35:00.000+01:00

I’m back! Whoo, that was a long week. I was a bit behind blogging on last Saturday’s events (which are finally posted!), then Sunday was spent slowly recovering from my long Saturday night, then I had a busy Monday night entertaining a friend at my place, then I was teaching on Tuesday, and then by Wednesday I had been plowed down by a powerful cold/flu/plague. So there won’t be any individual posts for the days since Saturday, but I’ll be back online for Friday, methinks.

Jeff Mills and Chloé at the Rex, 2 Buddies at Jett Afterparty

2009-01-31T23:15:00.000+01:00

My daytime activities were a bit truncated, since I had slept in rather late (14h00) and then spent a large portion of the day blogging the past few days and dealing with some correspondence. I had found out last night that a friend of mine was going to be spinning at an afterparty around 7h00, so I had a rather quiet evening to preserve my energies for later partying.

Jeff Mills, Chloé and Timid Boy @ Le Rex

I headed over to Le Rex around 1h00, thinking that that would be early enough to avoid an obnoxiously long lineup. I hadn’t managed to get on the list for that night, but I was prepared to just get in the cash line like everyone else. As I was walking over to the front door, I realized that I hadn’t waited in the “regular” line at Le Rex since I first returned to Paris in September.

Alas, the line was still massive and messy, running almost to the street corner, so I got in line and started to wait. The people in line ahead of me started to despair, saying that by the time they got to the front of the line, the club would be at capacity—so some of them left for other bars, which made the line move faster than expected. Nonetheless, a few minutes later, I saw my friends S. and D. show up, along with another friend of ours, L.

I hadn’t seen L. in ages, so we greeted each other enthusiastically. In the process, I had managed to lose my place in line, but all was not lost: my friends had a place on the guestlist. So my five-month record of not waiting in the “regular” line at Le Rex continues!

By the time we got into the club and checked our coats, Timid Boy’s set was about to finish, so we only heard a few tracks before he was replaced by Jeff Mills.

2h00-4h00: Jeff Mills

Mills’s set was oddly interesting, in that his style remains completely unchanged from what I heard from him in the late 90s, but at the same time he would occasionally incorporate tracks that were more in line with European tastes for minimal techno. There was pretty much no house influences of any sort to be heard in the set, and his overall style was still the Detroit Second-Wave definition of “minimal,” which involves a reduced set of musical elements and very slow rates of change, but also a high-intensity and high-impact sound. If you were to make a caricature of it, the sound would involve a pounding, unchanging 4/4 beat, a few synthesized tom-toms or claves on off-beats, and a single undulating synth line that slowly and slowly changes tone or shape over the course of 10 minutes; nothing more, sometimes less.

Anyway, the set was good for what it was; that is, if you liked what Jeff Mills was doing 10 years ago you probably loved this set, but if you weren’t a fan of him then, this set wasn’t going to convert you.

The four of us made an amusing quartet throughout the night. S. and D. are a couple, so they would occasionally kiss but otherwise they didn’t engage in any heavy petting or intense touching. L. and I, on the other hand, were no couple but spent the whole evening pawing at each other like we were at a cuddle party.

L. is generally very tactile for Parisian norms (and I think it’s not insignificant that she’s from Mauritius, rather than mainland France) and I’m naturally very tactile (I had to learn to tone it down while in France), so whenever we’re together, it’s like a non-stop caress-fest. When we saw each other outside the club, we immediately hugged each other (generally considered a way too intimate gesture here) and then linked arms while we waited to get in. On the dance floor, we would take turns giving backrubs, occasionally rub shoulders, hold hands, and otherwise find ways to entwine ourselves around each other. Good times.

4h00-7h00: Chloé

Chloé’s set was good. This is maybe a bit obvious, but it’s worth saying; Chloé has both impressed me and disappointed me in the past, so I never know if I’m going to enjoy or dislike her set. I’ve found that her live sets tend to bore me (especially the one she did at Mutek ’08 in Montreal!), but her DJ sets can be pretty good. This set was a bit heavy in its overall sound, but I guess that made sense as a continuation of Mills’s set. Her sound remains much more electro and even a bit psychedelic, tending toward a much thicker and busier texture than Mills. Nonetheless, the set seemed to go over well.

By about 6h30, we decided to start heading out to the afterparty. Franck Valat is L.’s boyfriend, so we wanted to be sure to get to the afterparty destination before 7h30, when he and his partner were scheduled to start. We had some trouble herding the quartet together—and in the process, we gathered another two people—but eventually we made our way outside and caught a pair of taxis.

Jett Afterparty @ Les Quatre Vents

The afterparty was at the same location as last week, so I was able to give the taxi driver directions to the place and we got there pretty quickly. There was the same bullshit with the mandatory coat check and 10€ drinks, but at least I was on the list this time. I got inside with L., grabbed a bottle of water while she went off to find Franck, and then we all settled in to wait until their set started. The DJ currently spinning was DJ HAK, I think, who I’m pretty sure is also the promoter of this series of afterparties. What I heard of his set was fine, but I’ll admit that I only heard a bit of it and I was sort of distracted talking with my friends.

7h30 -9h00: 2 buddies

Franck and Loulou gave a great set (I think that, when they perform as a duo, they go by “Madonna” and “Britney”), which I think worked really well as an afterparty set. The overall level of intensity was much lower than what we had heard at Le Rex, but it still had some forward motion. It also leaned much more towards miminal-house styles, so everything felt a bit looser and smother and generally funkier.

I had a good time, but I was running out of steam by the end of it. And so, as soon as they finished their set, I waited for an opportunity to congratulate Franck, said goodbye to everyone else, and then headed home.

For some reason (possibly insanity), I decided to bike home from the location, which meant leaving from the area near Odéon in the 6th arrondissement, crossing the river, crossing Les Halles and Le Marais, and finally ending up at my place at Parmentier in the 11th. It was sunny, so it didn’t feel too cold…

When I got home, the weather widget on my laptop said that it was -2°C outside.