La Cantatrice Chauve and 3some @ Le Pulp

Well, I went into work late (to make up for the overtime yesterday) and left on time, so I had a pretty nice day at work today. Also, one of my colleagues had extra tickets to a recent re-staging of La Cantatrice Chauve, so me and DJ suddenly had evening plans. I was supposed to also see a friend for an apéritif after work, but his last class of the day got out just before the play started, so we pushed it back to next week.

La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano) is an absurdist work by Eugene Ionesco, who was apparently inspired by a set of bizarre dialogues he found while learning English using the Asimil method. Mr and Mrs Smith are an English couple that, eventually, have another couple (the Martins) over for dinner, which is interrupted by several things, including their jester-like maid, and a fireman searching house-to-house for fires. The play is a series of barely-related vignettes, with many moments of self-contradiction, errors in speech, and slips in logic (e.g. "How lovely that you came to dinner uninvited; how dare you arrive late?!"). The title of the play comes from a line delivered by the fireman, just before he takes his leave, where he asks suddenly "And what of the Bald Soprano?" This apparently freaks everyone out, and finally one character says "She always wears her hair the same way," and everyone seems relieved. If you can read French, there are some juicy excerpts here. The play comes to a confusing climax, which ends right back at the beginning of the play, with the Martins playing the roles of the Smiths and vice-versa.

There were in fact several possible endings suggested by the original playwright, some of which were difficult to stage (i.e., destroying the set every night) or illegal (inciting a revolution within the audience and then shooting the audience members). The original staging at Theatre de la Huchette (which has been running continuously since 1957, much like the Mousetrap in England) simply runs back to the beginning of the play with the roles switched, and then stops arbitrarily; however, this "new" staging at Théâtre Athénée takes this same loop strategy, then interrupts it when all the characters come on stage, address the audience, and hold an impromptu lecture on the various possible endings. The idea of discussing the endings rather than actually doing any one of them is sorta neat, but it ran about 30 minutes longer than it needed to. One other change they made to this "newer" version was that they shifted the emotional delivery of many of the lines, emphasizing a darker and more awkward interaction between the various characters.

Anyway, the play was good, although I really want to go see the original one now, so that I can make a comparison. There was certainly a lot of humour to be found in the script. Mind you, I nearly missed the play, because I was running late and missed my connection on the métro at République. The theatre itself was beautiful; it was an old theatre obviously dating from the time before amplified sound, since the main floor didn't go further back than 30 rows and 20 seats across, but there were 3 balconies above it.

After the play, DJ and I headed over to Place des Vosges to grab a drink and some food at a café there (Café Hugo). After 1 litre of wine (between the two of us) and a great deal of UofC-related chatter, we staggered back to the métro and headed home. I, however, wanted to go out to Le Pulp for another one of their Thursday night events, particularly since tonight's program included a bunch of people from the Crosstown Rebels label. (The last time I was there was about three weeks ago.)

3some @ Le Pulp: Shonky, Dyed Soundorom and Jamie Jones

12h00?-3h45: Jamie Jones

It was already 1am when I caught the last train back to my apartment, so it was 1h40 by the time I changed and headed back out. I tried catching a night bus downtown, but I missed it and realized that the next one would take 30 minutes to arrive, so I grabbed a taxi instead. Thankfully, taxis don't cost much when traffic is low, so I got there for 8€. It took a while to get in; while I was waiting, a young lesbian couple speaking North American English wandered past the line, into the club (clearly they had some sort of line-jump), and then shortly back out. As they were leaving, they held a deliberately loud conversation with the bouncer over the heads of those in line, asking which night was the "girls" night; one of them made a point of saying in very clear English "Too many men" just before they walked away. A couple of guys standing in front of me looked at each other and said "She's right, this place is a sausage fest." Although Thursdays are normally a "mixed" night, the complaint wasn't entirely true. When I got in at 2h30, the place was packed with a pretty even mix of genders. While it's always pretty speculative to play "spot the lesbians" at events like this, about 10% of the females were clearly dressing/acting/groping the part. Gay men, on the other hand, were in relatively short supply.

Jones's set was first and foremost a house set. Were there minimal textures and microhouse elements? Sure, but the tracks he selected always seemed to place an emphasis on house-y rhythms and even the occasional vocal track. In a way, it's what I imagine microhouse would sound like when it doesn't pass through minimal techno.

3h45-4h45: Shonky

A friend back in Chicago made a point of telling me how hot Shonky was (in both senses), and he certainly had a point. Not only is Shonky pretty darn cute, but he spins a great set. (The guy in the foreground of this picture was acting creepy all night, coming on to everything with a vagina and being rather grabby. Thankfully, French girls are very good at rebuffing these sorts of attentions.) Shonky's set was mostly techno-centric and mostly minimal, with occasional minimal house tracks. Although the tempo was generally not as fast as big-room Marco Carola-style techno, Shonky maintained an emphasis on loud, punchy bass kicks and sparse mid-frequencies.

Midway through his set, I saw N. come up to the front of the crowd to say hi to Shonky (N. was last seen on this blog here). After the usual greeting, he drifted off to chat with a cloud of other people he seemed to know. There was a Labelle Records party coming up the next day, so he was doing a lot of canvassing to get support. The night is up against Akufen at Nouveau Casino (always a big draw) and a huge ACT-UP Paris charity party with a long list of DJs.

3h45-6h00: Dyed Soundorom

The whole crew, J. Jones, Soundorom, and Shonky.

I have to admit that I wasn't as thrilled with his set, but it was nonetheless pretty good. His selection of tracks tended more toward deep house and dubby house, with occasional techno-y moments. Shortly before I left at 5h30, Shonky came back on to throw on a few tracks. When he did, several people in the crowd applauded. While I don't know if the intention was to congratulate Soundorom or celebrate the return of Shonky, it elicited a rather sour look from him.

I sauntered onto the métro, swung by my boulangerie for a baguette and a pain au chocolat, and then headed back to my place to get some sleep.

Eat this heart out

The majority of my Valentine's Day was spent at work; several tasks and scheduled appointments gathered together on Wednesday to create a tightly-packed sequence of stuff to keep me busy. Although it was mostly fine, the last thing I did that day involved a video-conference for a dissertation defence, where the Internet-based video-conference technology wouldn't connect to the other device in Chicago. The connection was finally made (for reasons that were not entirely clear), but not before a fair bit of drama.

The evening, however, was looking up. I was going over to a colleague's place for dinner, and I was bringing the anticuchos de corazón that I had been marinating since last night. Also, my colleague had bought a whole wild seabass, so we were going to make ceviche as well. I brought over the fixings for the ceviche to make at her place; when you're using fish with such tender and good-quality flesh, you don't really need to marinate it for any amount of time. It's more like tangy sushi.

The night itself was very pleasant, much great conversation, much delicious food (including mine, thank you very much) and a slightly hectic run to the métro to catch the last train. Rather than give details, here's my recipe for the ceviche and the anticuchos:

Ceviche de Corvina (White Sea Bass)

Ingredients

• 15-30 limes (for 1-2 filets)
• 2 bitter oranges (if unavailable, an underripe orange will work)
• 2 red onions, medium, sliced into thin half-rounds.
• 2 medium-sized hot peppers, finely diced (A mixture of red and green make it pretty). This is normally an ají limo or amarillo in Peru, but whatever's fresh and spicy
• 1 tbsp of ginger, crushed, grated or finely diced
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, finely diced
• A handful of cilantro, chopped finely

Preparation

1. Cut the fish into 2cm cubes and soak in a bath of salted cold water while you prepare the rest of the mixture.
2. Juice the limes and oranges, taking care not to over-squeeze the limes (that makes for bitter juice). Place in a large nonreactive (non-metal) bowl.
3. Add onions, hot peppers, ginger, garlic and cilantro. Mix and salt to taste.
4. Drain and pat dry the fish, add enough of the citrus mixture to cover the fish and mix.
5. If the fish is fresh and tender (like corvina), wait a few minutes and then serve. If it's tough (like shark or octopus) marinate overnight. Soft fish will actually get firmer over time (as if it were cooked), while tough fish will tenderize over time.
6. As an alternative preparation, you can slice the fish paper-thin, rather than in cubes. This creates something like tiraditos, which is the Peruvian equivalent of sashimi. However, your fish needs to be really fresh for the thin slices to work.

Anticuchos de corazón (tangy beef heart shish kabobs)

Ingredients

• 1 beef heart (usually 1 - 2 Kg)
• 2-4 cups of red wine vinegar (enough to cover)
• 1/4-1/2 cup of cumin (to taste)
• 1/4 cup of vegetable oil
• 1 whole head of garlic (that's right), crushed or finely chopped
• 1 tbsp. of ají amarillo molido. If you don't have it, substitute a hungarian paprika.
• 1 tablespoon of achiote (annatto). Not crucial to flavor, but adds the right color.
• Salt & pepper to taste

Preparation

1. Cut the heart in half to expose the cavities and wash thoroughly, getting any clotted blood out.
2. Trim fat and veins on the exterior, taking care to remove any hardened vessels that sometimes run along the outside.
3. On the interior, trim away the tendons that criss-cross the cavities.
4. Start making 1"-wide slices. To remove any remaining fat, fascia (membrane) or connective tissue, press the slice firmly against the cutting board (trimming-side down) and run the knife parallel to the board, about 1-2 mm away. This should remove a thin slice and leave the rest of the meat.
5. Cut into 1" cubes. The cubes should consist of firm, dark red fatless meat.
6. Toss in a nonreactive container (I like 1-gallon Ziploc freezer bags) and add all the other ingredients. Squeeze out as much air as possible and put in fridge overnight.
7. 30 minutes before serving, place the cubes of meat on skewers and grill over a medium-high flame. Traditionally, you make another basting mixture out of oil and cumin and some other stuff, but I find it's just as easy to baste with the juices from the marinade. Watch out for the vinegar fumes, though!
8. If you don't have a grill, you can also broil in the oven. Failing that, you can sear them in a lightly-greased pan and use the marinade to de-glaze.

As a reward for those of you who read all the way to the end of my posts, here's a link to an amusing anti-valentines cards website.

Brussels! and Beef Heart

OK, beefheart first. I'm going over to a friend's place to make ceviche/cebiche and anticuchos. The ceviche I will make on the spot at her place (she's buying seabass for the occasion), but I needed to start the marinade for the anticuchos tonight. I'm making anticuchos de corazón (marinated heart skewers), so the first thing I needed to do was get a beef heart. At the open-air market this morning, I found everything else I needed (and even some stuff I didn't need), but no beef hearts. The closest thing was a few lamb hearts. They were tiny and cute (as cute as internal organs can be), but way too tiny. Besides, can you imagine trimming and de-veining a heart the size of your fist?

Anyway, I tried again after work, stopping off at a halal butcher shop near my place. Same story. I headed over to Belleville--Paris's china-maghreb-jewish-thai-vietnam-town. The store on the corner offered many other things I needed (bitter oranges, cilantro), but only pork hearts. Ew. Across the street, I walked into a very large butcher shop and asked the guy that looked like the owner. His answer: "Of course! How many do you need?" I was going to be feeding a group of people, so I was ready to order 2 or more, until I saw the hearts. These things were clearly cut from a freaking BULL. Each heart weighed 2 kilograms (about 4.5 lbs). I took one, and the butcher was nice enough to trim most of the fat off for me (although I later discovered he left the cartilaginous arteries in there).

Also, as I was arriving and leaving the Belleville métro stop, there were several groups of police officers stopping people on the street/in the métro station, demanding their immigration/citizenship papers. I hadn't witnessed a contrôle de papiers (paperwork check) since the first time I came to Paris as an exchange student in 1996, and I had forgotten how disturbing the sight can be. Although I realize that it's a part of immigration/border control, there's something sinister about going into "ethnic" neighborhoods on a busy day and ambushing anybody that looks Asian, African or Arab. I was spared the treatment (perhaps because I didn't fit those categories, perhaps because I was wearing the nice leather jacket my family got me for Xmas), which was good, since I had left my passport at home today. From now on, there will always be a photocopy of my passport on me.

So, I got home, dealt with a bunch of distractions, made some congee, and then got to preparing the beef heart. This thing is HUGE and I don't have much counter-space, so things were pretty awkward. Also, the veins on the outside of the heart were pretty hard, so I spent a lot of time carefully trimming them out. Also, the inside of the heart has all of these tendons that cross-cut the heart's chambers and help with the contractions of a beating heart. They're nasty and chewy, so I had to trim them out as well. Oh, and to top things off, this heart was DEFINITELY not halal; in other words, the blood hadn't been completely drained, which meant that there were dark little clots of blood lodged in all the chambers and veins, which I had to wash out. After nearly shredding the first few pieces in an attempt to trim them, I remembered a great trick: Take a slice of the heart, lay the side that you want to trim down on the board, press hard with your left hand, and slide the knife along the bottom, about 1-2mm from the cutting board. If the pressure is right and the blade very sharp, you should trim a very thin strip of tissue without wasting much of the edible meat.

Anyway, after cutting the heart into 1" cubes and throwing them into a large Ziploc bag, I added nearly an entire bottle of red wine vinegar, a bit of vegetable oil, a ton of cumin (more than a 1/4 cup, ground), some ají mirasol molido, some salt, and a whole head of finely chopped garlic. Mix, press out as much air as possible, stick in fridge overnight. Wash garlic stench from hands and clean beef blood from...well..everywhere.

And now, for something completely different. Pictures from Brussels!

The next few are all different views from the centre of the main square of Brussels. Gorgeous!

Delightful!

Stunning!

Orgasmic!

Excelsior!

Unmistakably phallic!

Okay, now I'm kinda spent and just want to nap...

These were some of the first covered galleries in Europe

This was just an abandoned lot, but it stuck out among beautiful art-nouveau buildings.

I was particularly compelled by the brightly-coloured lightbulbs

This old art-nouveau store was turned into the museum of musical instruments.

On each balcony, they had a different example of musical notation

Hotels near Luis

[No Brussels pics just yet. I'm getting to them, I'm just busy. Not lazy. It's hard not to look lazy when managing communication with potential consultants can also be described as "answering emails."]

So, after a rather long day at work, I headed back home, but with a substantial detour. My mother is planning a trip to a medical conference in Nantes in June, and we're hoping that she can stay in Paris for a few nights, too. A lot of this rests on whether I can find her reasonable accommodation in Paris, so I took to the internet last night, trawling around. I knew that I would find significantly lower prices if I looked at non-chain hotels in the suburbs near my place, rather than in Paris. Although I have a Paris address, I live just on the city limits, with Les Lilas and Pré Saint-Gervais literally 1 block away from me. When I do groceries, I'm in the banlieue (suburbs, but also euphemistic for "the ghetto" or "projects," since the two are often coextensive around Paris). Les Lilas is a rather urbanized and working-middle class / mixed area that I've really come to like.

The problem was finding the hotels in Les Lilas. The usual online Hotel search engines (hotels.com, expedia, etc) didn't even have Les Lilas as a city you could search in. I checked some of the French discount chains, but they only had locations at Porte de Pantin (closer to the airport and several conference sites) or Porte de Bagnolet (close to the airport and the bus station). I was contemplating wandering around my neighborhood, looking for hotels on sight, when I came across the website for this département's Tourism Board (FYI: It's #93, Seine Saint-Denis, which includes the location of the banlieue riots last year). Like any decent local-tourism website, they had directories for local hotels. I found two for the municipality (commune) of Les Lilas: New Residence and Hotel Paul de Kock (don't giggle, the place is nice).

The first is an apartment-style hotel in a slightly newer-looking building, while the second is an old-fashioned hotel. Also, the first has more complicated apartment-style policies (30% down payment on stay for reservation, 100% upon arrival as security deposit; 14-day cancellation policy) but provides you with a kitchen and full bathroom, while the second has standard booking policies. A "studio" in New Residence will cost you 48€/night for 1 person, 58€ for two, with a slight reduction if you're staying for 7 nights. In Hotel Paul de kock, a room with a shower (but shared bathroom) will cost you 35€/night for either one or two people, and 40€/night for shower and bathroom in your room.

What's great about these hotels is that they are both about 50 feet from the end of the 11 métro line, Mairie des Lilas station. In other words, you're staying in the banlieue and enjoying it's correspondingly low prices, but you can get downtown by subway in 20-30 minutes. Also, the same night bus that I take to get back from the clubs at night (N23 or N16) runs by this area as well. Next time I need to stay in France for a short stay, I know where to go!

Post-Brussels & Indian Cooking

Well, I'm back from Brussels. I'm not posting much in the way of details of my trip, although I will post some lovely pictures in a day or two. What I can say about the trip is that I ate a lot of amazing moules frites (steamed mussels with fries) and fantastic Belgian beer (especially the Trappist stuff).

In the place of a review of my Brussels trip, here's a list of things I've discovered about cooking Indian food over the past few weeks:

• Tomatoes and Onions go into everything. The base for all currys that I've made is a bed of finely chopped onions, fried until golden and sweet, and then mixed with finely chopped tomatoes until both reduce to a mush. Not only does this give great flavor, but it also provides a thickening base for the dish.
• Garlic and Ginger in great amounts. Equal amounts of crushed/chopped garlic and ginger always go in after onions and tomatoes, and before the dry spices. The smell of this combination as it cooks is instantly recognizable.
• Simmer down, add water, simmer down. Instead of adding a ton of water and walking away, add only enough liquid to cover the food. Simmer and stir until the liquid is nearly gone, and then add another cup or so of water. Keep going until everything is thick and saucy. Something about this technique seems to help create thick sauces.
• Always more butter. Seriously. The more butter you can include, the better. Start the onions and tomatoes in clarified butter (ghee). When you add the spices, add some butter as well. When you think your sauce is just thick enough and you're going to remove it from the oven, fold in some more butter and stir. Or you can just pour a ladleful of melted butter if you've got that handy. Butter butter butter.

Ack! To Brussels!

Ack! I need to be up in 5 hours to escort the students to a field trip in Brussels. I'm really looking forward to the trip, but not at all to the 5am wake-up call. Must get to bed.

So, I will be non-posting from tomorrow until Sunday, and I probably won't blog very much about Brussels, since I'll be accompanied by a work colleague and I try to keep the details of work out of my blog. Nonetheless, I may post a few cute pictures. I will also eat a lot of chocolate, moules frites, and beer

Quick note about today: Nothing very exciting at work, but I hit the grands magasins today (Printemps and Galeries Lafayette in particular). It's the last days of the great post-Christmas sale season (which runs rather long here), so things were rather picked over. However, things were also marked down a lot deeper than the last time I was there. I finally bought this adorable rainbow-pastel cashmere scarf that was originally 165€, but now 60€. It's both more and less gay than you probably think it is. And it's really, really soft.

I also bought Breton salted butter caramels that I CAN'T STOP EATING!!

A quiet night of quietness

After a really, really long day at work (another take-apart-a-laptop day), I was thrilled to just go home, make some food, and sit still for a while. Of course, I finally re-stocked on garlic (which I was languishing without) and took advantage of it to make a huge batch of tzatziki. Ironically, I had a beautiful cucumber sitting in my fridge for well over a week, while I searched up and down paris for a big container of Greek yogurt. What I came to realize is that French folks don't sell yogurt in large containers. Literally all commercially available yogurt is in those tiny plastic cups. In the end, I just bought a whole case of "greek-style" yogurt cups and mixed them together, but next time I'm making my own damn yogurt (thanks for the recipe, Celia!).

Anyway, since I have very little of interest to relate for today, here's my tzatziki recipe instead:

Luis's Most Likely Inauthentic But Delicious Tzatziki

Ingredients

• 1 cucumber (see step one for preparation)
• 500-600 g of yogurt (or 1 quart), Greek or Balkan style is best (i.e. Thick)
• Garlic to taste (have a whole head within reach, just in case). Don't use preserved garlic or garlic powder. You need the powerful bite of raw garlic.
• Enough de-stemmed mint leaves to fill your hand completely
• Olive oil to taste (usually 1-2 tbsp)
• salt to taste
• lemon juice (optional)

Preparation

1. Crush garlic and put in a large bowl with a bit of olive oil and salt (to infuse the oil with the garlic). Start with about 1/4 of the head. If (like me) you don't have a garlic press or a microplane, I find you can chop garlic incredibly finely if you treat it like a very small onion. I'll post pics of my trick someday.
2. You can peel the cucumber, although I think it's a waste of good fiber. Either way, cut the cuke in half and then take each half and quarter it lengthwise. De-seed with a spoon. I used to toss the gelatinous seed membranes into the tzatziki because I loved the taste of it, but it tends to make the final product water. So just eat them now. Go on. I'll wait.
3. OK, so slice the de-seeded quarters lengthwise as thinly as possible, line them up in a bunch, and proceed to slice them crosswise, creating tiny, tiny cubes. Toss in with garlic and sprinkle a bit of salt to get the juices flowing.
4. Take all the mint and chop it as finely as you can. Add to the bowl and mix, adding a bit of oil if necessary.
5. Finally, add yogurt and mix. Add a bit of very good olive oil until the mixture gets a bit glossy and you can sort of taste the oil. Lemon juice as well if you like. Test for garlic levels. If it's not pungent enough, add more now.
6. You can serve it immediately, but you'll get an uneven taste. It will be yogurt with flavourful bits of cucumber and spicy garlic, rather than a mix of all these flavours. Instead, I suggest storing overnight in the fridge and then serving.
7. Finally a few warnings. Don't overthin the tzatziki! The chunks of cucumber will release a bit of fluid during the night (nocturnal emissions!), which will make things a bit more watery than you left them. Also, as the garlic flavour infuses the rest of the yogurt, the bite will be qualitatively stronger the next day. So be ready for a garlicky blast!

I have heard that you can prepare the cucumber by grating it, but I'm not fond of this method, since it requires you to then strain it, thus losing a lot of delicious cucumber water. If you are going to grate it, I suggest using thicker yogurt (and less of it) and not dumping the liquid.

Backlog!!

Considering my usual rhythm of blog-posting, some of you may be puzzled by the recent pause in blogging, perhaps fearing me for dead. Fortunately (for me, at least) I'm still alive, although a bit busy. After a rather busy end of the week and weekend, Sunday (which was going to be my catch-up day) was interrupted by a persistent network outage at the residences, which put blogging out of the question. Anyway, I'll be catching up tonight and tomorrow, so keep checking back for new posts.

Updates

Thurs, Feb 1	Done!
Fri, Feb 2	Done!
Sat, Feb 3	Done!
Sun, Feb 4	Done!
Mon, Feb 5	Done!

Know your Encapsulation!

This is, effectively, a continuation of what may well become a running thread in this blog: Luis discovers crap about IT arcana that took him all day to figure out. The most recent discovery, entitled Know your MTU!, was that there were physical problems with France Telecom's lines that were creating a great deal of packet loss; the solution was to reduce Maximum Transmission Units (MTUs) to reduce packet fragmentation.

This time around, it was encapsulation. One of our network routers--and the one that is usually the most stable--suddenly dropped off the grid at some point during the weekend and steadfastly refused to reconnect. When I plugged the output from the ADSL modem into my laptop and tried to make the PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet) connection, it still wouldn't connect. When I used ClubInternet.fr (our ISP)'s low-speed phone modem connection, it connected perfectly (although painfully slowly). Clearly there wasn't a system-wide problem, because our other two routers were working fine. I got into the range of another router and looked online to check the status of our accounts with our ISP. Everything was in order, so there was no reason to suspect that the account had been cancelled. Finally, I spent a bit of time reading through reams of postings to the user's support forums. After reading what seemed like a million threads entitled "I can't !@#$ing connect!!!!1!" I finally noticed that one (seemingly knowledgeable) person was advising another member to set up his ADSL connection using PPPoA (PPP over ATM). Essentially, PPPoA uses a different form of encapsulation (i.e., how it formats packets and how it receives them) that offers slightly less overhead, and thus slightly better transmission rates--but at the risk of being a bit less flexible and reliable viz. PPPoE.

Aaaaaanyway. Aside from the PPPoA, the setup this guy was describing was identical to mine, so I hacked into the ADSL modem and set it to PPPoA. Bing! Everything was right back online. Unfortunately, the wireless router isn't able to do PPPoA, so I couldn't leave the ADSL modem on bridge-mode and concentrate the ADSL and WiFi management into one router. Instead, I re-set the ADSL modem in PPPoA mode, running a DHCP server in the 192.168.0.1 subnet, and then set up the wireless router to take an IP address from the ADSL modem and split that into another DHCP subnet as 192.168.1.1. Alas, it's a bit inefficient, in that our packets now have to pass through two internal subnets (and thus there's a lot of port translation going on).

That was pretty much my day. I slept in a bit as I wasn't feeling very well, dedicated most of my day to fixing this mess, and then went grocery shopping. I used some of the Keema Masala that I had kicking around for a fantastic ground beef curry with spicy jasmine rice, and then I made a version of my friend Erika's vinegar-and-oil beets, which are in fact a version of the amazing beets served at Lula Café in Chicago. Delicious! I'll be peeing purple for days, I'm sure.

Le Bowl de Super XLI

Well, most of my day was pretty uneventful. I got up, threw on some clothes, and started at the gigantic pile of laundry that had been accumulating for weeks in my closet. It was a Sunday afternoon, so I was competing with a bunch of other students for 3 washers and dryers. There were harsh words, lies, subterfuge, and still-damp dryer loads.

Things got more fun in the evening, when I met up with DJ to go see the SuperBowl. Admittedly, I'm not a big sports fan (soccer being the exception, and even then it's a pretty superficial fandom), but I was intrigued by the notion of watching the SuperBowl in a Parisian bar and I was looking forward to some excellent commercials.

The game was to start at approx. 1h00 Paris time, so we headed out around 23h00 to grab a seat at the bar. We were heading to The Moose (apparently now called the Moosehead), which is a "Canadian" bar near Odéon. Alas, we misjudged the crowds and arrived to a bar that was already PACKED with bodies. After shuffling around and finding absolutely no seating, we grabbed a spot against a wall and in good view of a television screen, ordered our beers (20€ admission, but with 3 pints included) and waited for the game to start.

The opening ceremonies were...um...gay. And I say this as a cheerfully gay man. When I mean gay, I don't mean "style-conscious cosmopolitan" gay, but "puffy poet's blouse with garish patterns" gay. The performance included cirque du soleil tumblers on swings, people running around with brightly-coloured hangliders in the shape of butterflies, and male cheerleaders wearing board shorts. Overall, the colour palette looked like it was taken from the opening credits of Saved By The Bell. Toward the end, there was a "Look! We're in Miami! So here's some brown people dancing all spicy!!" moment.

As the game proceeded (brief: Bears began with an amazing opening touchdown, then fell apart a few minutes later, but the Colts weren't exactly on their game, either), DJ and I wrestled to maintain our spot on against the wall, occasionally elbowing people around and (un)intentionally stepping on their toes. By halftime, people were beginning to filter out (particularly the French ones), but it wasn't until the last few minutes of the game that we succeeded in scoring a spot at the bar.

An odd highlight of the game was Prince's halftime performance. At the time, the sound on the TVs was about 1-2 seconds ahead of the video feed, so it was hard to judge the musical performance. Nonetheless, there was something amusing about seeing the queer-but-hetero Prince do his thing for a stadium full of football fans. In what was most certainly a reference to the Janet Jackson "nipplegate" of a couple of years ago, Prince did something with his guitar that was not entirely wholesome. See the 9 minute mark in the video below for an illustration:

One last comment: The video feed was from a British channel, rather than an American one, so I totally missed out on the usually very amusing SuperBowl commercials. Boo!