Recovery, Currywurst and Wandering

Considering how late I had gotten to bed the night before, I was actually pretty surprised that I got up before noon. At around 11h30, I hauled myself out of bed and got showered and cleaned up. The roommate with the password to the WiFi setup still wasn’t home, so I did a bit of avant-blogging (i.e., writing my blog post in a .doc file) and then I decided to go for a walk.

I remember from my last visit to Berlin that I had really loved the Tiergarten (literally, “Animal Garden,” or “zoo,” but really a massive park similar to NYC’s Central Park). So off I went for a walk. The weather was really lovely—sunny, but not too hot—so I actually traversed the entirety of the park from one end to the other and back again, without realizing just how far I had walked (nearly 3 km in each direction).

When I got back to the eastern end of the park, I noticed that there was some sort of large public event going on at the Brandenburg gate. As I approached, I saw a bunch of beer tents (of course) and food stands, so I approached the first one that looked pretty “authentic” and got a Currywurst. Unlike the one I had had last night, this was one great. The sausage was delicious on its own, the ketchup was spiced with curry powder, and the whole thing had a generous dose of curry powder on top of it. The currywurst came with a little roll of bread (rather dry), which had a little paper US flag stuck in it. That’s odd.

As I walked westward along the street away from the Brandenburg Gate, I saw—between the food and beer stands—little information booths that advertised vacations in different US states, exchanges and training in the US, and so on. Hmm.

While I was buying this fantastic combination of garlic bread, tomatoes, green onions and garlic sausage, I was a German family walk buy with an “Obama for America” balloon attached to their kid’s stroller. OK, what the fuck?

So I start walking back to the Brandenburg Gate and quickly notice a large pixel-screen mounted nearby, showing what appeared to be a Harlem-Renaissance-influenced ballet troupe performing to an operatic arrangement of Black Spirituals. Well, clearly something is up.

I passed through the Brandenburg Gate and found the same stage that had appeared on the pixel-screen. At this point, they were in between acts, and a young-looking host was interviewing a few people on the stage. They were in the middle of interviewing a man who spoke German with an American accent, who was talking about “warm relations” with Germany and the usual kind of empty diplomatic talk. At one point, he said “You know, we have an election coming up in the USA, which might change things drastically,” which elicited a huge torrent of applause from the crowd. As it turns out, this was the ambassador of the US Embassy, which had just opened a new, shiny location in Berlin today. Well, that explains the US-philia on the streets (at first, I had thought that it was a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Berlin airlift), but not the Obama balloons and buttons and bumper stickers, and so on.

As I made my way around the few booths on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, I finally saw it. The “Democrats Abroad” organization had a booth, and they were selling Obama balloons and buttons as a fund-raiser. Not only were Berliners supportive of Obama, they were willing to pay 1€ / balloon to prove it. Goodness.

Now full of food and beer (including this delicious green beer that involves Berlin white beer and woodruff), I made the journey back to my apartment. I had plans on working on my blog and unpacking and finally getting a lot of things organized, but I had underestimated the effect that 6+ hours walking in the sun can do to you. By the time I got home, I was dead tired, so I flopped myself into bed, relishing the fact that I could opt to sleep when I wanted to.

Berlinmitflugzeugfahrenzugehen!

After a quiet morning of re-packing my bags and sorting out the stuff that I was leaving behind (my host was kind enough to hold onto one piece of luggage with my winter clothes in it, so that I didn’t’ have to lug it to Berlin and back), I got ready to head to the airport for my 14h00 flight to Berlin. I still had one very large and heavy piece of luggage, another overstuffed carry-on case, and my backpack. Considering that today was the first day of le grand départ (i.e., grades and acceptances have just been announced for students, who now leave Paris in droves for vacations) I had braced myself for a long hike through the Paris subway stations to get myself to Orly airport.

My host and his daughter thought (sensibly) that my plan was insane, and tried to persuade me to take a cab. We checked the traffic online and it wasn’t too bad, so I decided to get a cab. As it turned out, most of the cab phone-lines were busy, and those that weren’t refused to come to the centre of the 20th arrondissement to pick me up, because apparently rue de Belleville was running too slowly.

So, I set off by foot to place Gambetta, which had a taxi stand that I hoped would have a cab arriving soon. Also, place Gambetta was downhill from where I was starting, so it made the walk with luggage a bit easier. Once I got to the taxi stand, I found a cluster of people already waiting for a cab, so I had to wait while everyone else fought over the first few cabs. Again, the cabbies seemed to have the right to refuse service: they would ask, “Where are you going?” and if they didn’t like the destination, they would just keep driving. In Toronto and Chicago, cabbies can’t ask where you’re going until you’re in the car, and they can’t unreasonably refuse service once you’re in the car.

Anyway, my cab eventually came. He pulled a u-turn on a busy street to get to me, which got him into some trouble with a woman who followed him into the u-turn, thinking he was turning down a side street that she obviously wanted to reach. This meant the cabbie couldn’t back out to complete his turn, and oncoming traffic was approaching. The situation was eventually resolved, but not without a lot of yelling and hand gestures.

The drive to the airport was a bit slow and uneventful, as was the check-in at the airport and the flight itself. Within a few hours, I found myself at the Berlin Schoenfeld Airport, hauling my (thankfully four-wheeled) luggage toward the S-Bahn station (i.e., the urban light rail system). The Berlin transit system is much more wheelchair-accessible than the Paris system, so I was mostly able to get into and out of the stations by ramp or elevator.

I managed to make it to my new apartment and get inside. Alas, the apartment is on the 3rd floor (i.e., 4th floor by American reckoning), and there was no elevator to make the trip easier. So I lugged my very, very heavy luggage up three flights of stairs to meet my new roommates covered in sweat.

After a glass of water and a moment to catch my breath, I struck up conversation with one of the roommates, who happens to also be involved in the Berlin techno scene. Yay! As it turns out, she was going to a friend’s birthday party in a converted industrial studio, so she invited me along as a warm-up for my later plans (it was Perlon night at Panorama Bar / Berghain, and I wasn’t going to miss that).

Obviously, I’m not going to blog in detail about a private party, so I’ll just say that it was a lot of fun, I got to meet a bunch of Berliners (“real” Berlin natives, which are pretty rare in Berlin now), and it was definitely a good warm-up for Berghain.

Berghain was as great and gritty and insane as it was the last time I was there, little more than a year ago. There was the same African-American guy checking bags, the heavily tattooed and pierced German guy at the door, and the same clusters of young partygoers. The only difference was that—as the first day of the summer for most European students—there was a lot of French and English to be overheard in the lineup.

I caught the last bit of Dan Bell’s vinyl set, which ran until 2am. Then Sammy Dee spun from 2am to 4am, showcasing the typical Perlon sound, with massive, resonant bass kicks and sparse punctuating patterns. As had been observed by me and another writer at mutek, this is apparently the summer of conga drums + minimal techno, as there were a lot of “tropical” sounds in the mix.

Dan Bell came on again at 4am to do a live set as DBX. The sound was great, although something about his set made me lose interest rather quickly. I stuck around to hear the beginning of Zip’s set, and then I headed back home around 5h30. Certainly, if I wanted to party properly in Berlin, I would’ve stuck it out until 10h00 or noon, but I had just finished about 4 days of non-stop travel, and I was running out of steam. While it was certainly a great way to celebrate the end of a very long and stressful period of my life, my body found its limits.

Certainly, one of the things that propelled me to leave Berghain / Panorama Bar was that I had run out of cash and I was terribly thirsty. I walked to the nearby S-Bahn / train station, climbed over the piles of burnt-out partygoers loafing about in the station, and found a Geldautomat (ATM machine). I withdrew 100€, and the stupid machine gave me two 50€ bills. Dammit. None of the small food stands around here is going to accept a bill this large and so frequently counterfeited.

But there was a McDonald’s open. Ah-ha! Large chain restaurants can’t just refuse bills because they feel like it. So I buy a cheap soft drink from there and break my bill, then wander back to the imbiss (food stand) near the entrance and get myself a Currywurst. Currywurst is a Berlin “specialty,” in the same way that poutine is a Montréal specialty. It usually involves some sort of pork sausage (Wurst), sliced and then covered in a “curry sauce,” which is usually ketchup with curry powder. Then, the whole ensemble is dusted with more curry powder. This is the sort of thing that you can only get at food stands, in a flimsy paper plate.

The currywurst at this particular imbiss was a bit lackluster, but the symbolic act of eating it to punctuate the end of a long period of travel and change was satisfying in itself. From there, I slouched my way into a train and headed back to the apartment to crash onto my bed in the morning sun.

Get Everything done in Paris, Day 2

Well, I had finally fallen asleep around 19h00 last night, and perhaps unsurprisingly I was up at 7h00 the next day. Since everyone else seemed to be asleep, I tried to get up quietly and shower…and failed. My host’s apartment is one of those lovely old buildings with exposed rafters and century-old floors; lovely, but impossible to traverse without sounding like a car crash.

I spent a good couple of hours answering emails and blogging, and then I headed off in the direction of “The Phone House” (pronounced “Zee Phown Hahoos”) to try to get a cell phone. After dragging my butt to the Gambetta location (which was closed without any explanation), I headed over to another location near Châtelet to try my luck there. This one was indeed open, but (of course) I couldn’t sign a cell phone contract without my RIB (relévé d’itentité bancaire), which my bank wouldn’t produce for me right away; it would (of course) take several weeks to arrive by mail. Ah, French bureaucracy, how I didn’t miss you.

From there, I headed over to my old residence from my last stay in Paris, Résidences Lila, to hang out with an employee there that I had gotten to know well. On my way from the métro station to the residences, some guy tried to pick me up (see my blog entry from almost 2 years ago on la drague in Paris); he kept staring at me and adjusting his no-longer-very-dangly bits. On the upside, he was pretty attractive; on the downside, I had a meeting to get to. Nonetheless, I took this as a some sort of good omen.

After getting all the gossip from my friend at the residences, I headed off to grab a formule déjeuner (“lunch combo”) from my old boulangerie, and then ate it in the park near the subway station. I had to get to the UofC center again for some more paperwork, so for nostalgia’s sake, I got on the good ol’ PC 2 bus and rode from Porte des Lilas to the UofC center. Good times.

At the center, I sat down with the student admin guy and filled out my titre de séjour (“visitor’s ID”) application, which involved about 4 different forms, photos, many many signatures and a lot of complaining on our part. From there, I ran off to the American Church in Paris—which is not the American Cathedral in Paris, despite my thinking otherwise—where I had been told that local apartment owners post free and usually non-agency vacancies, job offers, and sales. Although there was absolutely nothing available in September (it was early July, so everything was for immediate rental), it was heartening to see so many available apartments in the rental range that I had envisaged. In fact, there was an ideal 20m2 (215 sq feet) studio with furnishing and all amenities on place Gambetta (XXth arrondissement), which I would’ve jumped on if I were looking for a place this month. I picked up a copy of FUSAC, which is a Paris based English-language community magazine, and browsed the listings there as well.

I had a meeting at 18h30 to see a studio that a friend had be trying to rent to me on behalf of another friend, but it was only 15h00 and I had time to kill. So I sat down with my copy of FUSAC at a nearby café, ordered some coffee and later some pastis, and I set to reading the listings there more carefully. Just by limiting my search to the 18th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, I managed to find a bunch of rental offers that suited my needs, so that also made my appointment later that evening seem a bit less high-pressure.

You see, the apartment my friend wanted me to look at is not so much a studio as a single room, 13m2 ( 140 sq feet), with a shared washroom, no kitchen (just a hotplate) and a little window. The apartment was certainly well-placed (on place Monge in the Latin Quarter, overlooking an old academic building), and the price was pretty good (600€, all utilities incl.), but I couldn’t imagine living without a kitchen and a private bathroom. Ironically, I could imagine living in that tiny space, despite my usual preference for large living quarters, but the lack of a real kitchen or bathroom made it seem like a step down from my previous lodgings at Residences Lila, rather than up.

Anyway, I had my moment of café culture and found that I still had some time before my meeting. So off I went to Le Marais (the queer neighborhood) to wander around and visit some old haunts. I hit this bakery (boulangerie Matineau, I think) that makes these fantastic fresh marshmallows. I got a raspberry marshmallow and wandered my way around the area, stuffing sticky fluff into my mouth.

The apartment meeting came and went, and I left with an urgent request from the landlady to make up my mind quickly. As I headed home, I came to the conclusion that there was no way I could live there, despite the lovely location and great view.

During the subway ride, there were three teenaged boys on the train fooling around, playfighting and insulting each other. This may have gone unnoticed at another time of the day, but as it was still the later end of rush hour, the train was packed full of tired people, trying to get home. Naturally, one of them bumped into a businessman, who glared at them and gave the most parental, scolding, “I didn’t come here to get shoved around.” This drew some insincere apologies from the boys, as well as a temporary lull in the more physical part of their horseplay.

However, this also inspired a new round of insults, where they shouted increasingly more serious insults at each other—over the head of that same businessman, to make it clear that they were indirectly meant for him. This turned up the tension, and when one of the boys inevitably bumped into him again, the businessman—without raising his voice—started in on a stern lecture about acting civilized in public. I recognized this as the French version of the “act educated / well brought-up” lecture I always got as a child of Latino parents.

Still laughing and not being at all sincere, one of boys offered this apology: “Sorry, we can’t help it, we’re Arab.” Indeed, all three of the boys were visibly of maghrebin descent (i.e., North-African Arab and/or Berber), and they spoke with the right kind of banlieusard (“suburbanite”, but with low-class connotations) accents to mark them as being part of that 2nd-generation immigrant group. The other boys in the trio picked up on the potential of that statement and started to repeat their own versions of this self-racist apology, riffing on it for comedic effect.

This left the (white, French) businessman in an awkward position: if he accepted their apologies, he would also be assenting to a racist generalization that would be intolerable if attached to him; if he rejected their apologies, he might seem petty. In the end, the businessman dismissed the whole interaction with a “n’importe quoi” (“whatever”) and the train pulled into the next station, where the boys were going to get off. However, another young girl (tanned, but more visibly French than Arab) tapped their shoulders as they were getting off the subway and said, “Hey, bullshit isn’t an Arab specialty, it’s universal.”

I don’t quite know what the moral of this story is, but I like how it encapsulates so many of the tensions of life in Paris.

I got back to my host’s place and did a bit of e-mail work and so on, and then took the host and his daughter out for dinner. From there, it was off to a bar called Le Pin Up to see a soirée organized by my friend, Fantômette. I had received one of her weekly “what techno stuff is going on in Paris” e-mail newsletters, which told me that she was organizing one last event before the summer break. Since it coincided with one of my few nights in Paris, I just had to go. Despite having crossed 7 time zones only a day ago, and having spent the day running around Paris, I put on my party clothes and headed over to the bar.

I had sent an email ahead to Fantô ahead of my arrival, but apparently I sent it to the email account that she doesn’t regularly check, because when I showed up at the bar, her hands went to her mouth in surprise. We spent a moment catching up briefly, only to discover that we were both going to Berlin for the summer. Holy shit! As of about the 14th of July, I’m going to have a party buddy.

I struck up conversation with a co-worker of Fantô, and we went down into the basement, where the dance floor was, to see her spin. The basement was really a converted cave (i.e., root cellar / wine cellar), which I don’t think had ever been thoroughly sealed. The result was that the place smelled pretty moldy and, at one point, it smelled distinctly of poop. Hooray Paris sewers!

Anyway, we had a great conversation, which lasted a couple of hours, and by half past midnight (which is really early, even for a warm-up party) I said my goodbyes and headed home.

Get Everything done in Paris, Day 1

Although I didn’t really succeed in getting any sleep on the plane, I’m putting in another blog entry as if it was a brand new day; a brand new day wearing yesterday’s clothes and covered in a layer of airport grime.

So we landed in Paris 15 minutes ahead of schedule (hooray!) and stumbled off the plane. I spent nearly way too long waiting in line at the currency exchange desk, only to find that there were bank machines on the exterior of the terminal. Great.

As always, the French “passport control” involved a simple glance at my passport. Nothing like the intense and scary grilling that you get when you cross into the US. Part of this laxness, I think, is that government agents in France can actually stop you on the street and demand your immigration papers at any time, so there’s not as much need to stop us at the borders. Also, my passport was Canadian and not Algerian or Malian or something else from a former French colony, so I was probably benefiting from that.

Anyway, I stumbled out of the airport with my 3 huge, overpacked bags and grabbed a taxi. As we were on the A3 and heading into Paris, traffic suddenly got very slow. After a few minutes of stop-and-go traffic, we passed a pixelboard that said “A3 → BP, 45 mins.” In other words, it would take 45 minutes just to get to the border of Paris. About 30 minutes into that escapade, my taxi driver banged the steering wheel and started cursing at all of the single-occupancy vehicles surrounding us, accusing them of creating this traffic jam. I was in the mood to kvetch, too, so I joined in the bitch-fest and we consoled ourselves with the resentment of other commuters until we got into Paris. The driver was really good about trying to get me as close as possible to my destination (which was at the centre of a network of one-way streets), so I gave him a large tip (relative to French standards) and hauled my luggage the rest of the way to the apartment.

I’m staying at the apartment of a colleague from my Paris job; she was in Chicago at the moment, working on her own project, so she handed me the keys to her place the day before I left. Her husband heard me dragging my luggage through the courtyard and came out to help me get my stuff into the apartment. I should really take a picture of their courtyard at some point, as it is this lovely narrow row of bushes and trees.

[a quick lesson in French grammar: In French, you have two kinds of affirmative answers to a question, “oui” and “si.” You use “oui” when you’re answering a question phrased in the positive, such as “did you go out last night?” You use “si” as a more emphatic statement, in response to a negative question, such as “You didn’t sleep with him last night, did you?” “But yes!” “Oh, gross.” So, when my host said “You’re not too tired, I hope.” My answer was “Si.”]

After having a much-needed coffee with my host, I sent off an “I’ve arrived!” email and then took an also much-needed shower. After that, I was feeling a lot more human.

Once I was dressed, I sauntered off to the nearest subway station to head over to my future work site (The UofC Paris Center) to get some administrative stuff taken care of. I still had my old NaviGo pass from last year (an RFID passcard), so I just re-charged it with a week-long transit pass. I was out of sorts and needed an employee to explain to me which machine took bills, but eventually I was sorted and on my way.

In a strange moment of symbolism (not lost on my colleagues), it was raining by the time I got out of the subway and headed over to the Paris Center. Since I’m continuing my previous custom of not blogging about work, I’ll just say that everyone is doing well, they’ve all retained their sick sense of humour, and they now have a hilariously high-tech fingerprint scanner at the front door.

After having lunch and coffee with my colleagues, I managed to wrangle from them an Attestation de Domicile (a proof of living quarters that you need to do practically anything in France). From there, I was off to open a bank account at the bank next door. That took a fair bit of time but was eventually successful; the only snag was that the young man opening my account put my first names in the wrong order, so now I’m Manuel-Luis Garcia, according to the bank. He told me I could correct that later, which I can only hope, knowing French bureaucracy.

I was planning to open a French cell phone line before leaving for Berlin, but I left that for the next day and instead headed over to my old neighborhood metro stop, Porte des Lilas, to hit my “regular” bakery from my previous year in Paris. I was pleasantly surprised to see all the employees recognize me and ask me where I had been. In fact, I ended up exchanging kisses (la bise) with the woman with whom I had traded recipes and food during my last stay.

After that encounter, I took a constitutional walk back to the apartment, since the last subway ride had nearly put me to sleep. I was determined to stay awake until the evening, to properly re-set my body clock. I spent a bit of time at the apartment chatting with my host and his daughter, answered some emails, and then lurched off to bed, ready to collapse.

Goodbye, Chicago

Well, here I am, in Terminal 1 of Chicago’s O’Hare airport, waiting for my flight to Paris. I’m drenched in relief, which is only partly sweat (and thankfully not urine; that’s not the relief I’m talking about). But relief is always the imprint and exquisite scar of earlier distress, and I was certainly up to tits in stress and distress these past few days, weeks, months.

I should’ve kept a running blog of how crazy my life has been since the day, back in late January, when my teaching workload suddenly doubled for the rest of the year, setting off a constant accumulation of stressors that continued into my preparations for Berlin and Paris, culminating in the last week or so of sheer panic. I’m not a high-strung person, but I’ve certainly had a taste of it. In fact, my sister had recently told me of a medical survey that suggested that people of “Mediterranean” ethnicities (and its diaspora) under stress tend to score low on scales of anxiety (e.g., sleep loss, emotional labiality, panic attacks, and so on) but have a higher rate of somatization. In other words, “brown” folks tend to turn their stress into bodily ailments, rather than excessive affect. And, so, my Bell’s Palsy seems less random.

Anyway, things came to a peak yesterday, during the final 24 hours before the flight. As you might imagine, I was running around Chicago, having last-minute meetings, running final errands, and making my goodbyes. All of this was made more intense by the fact that I no longer had my car (left it in Canada), so I had to run these final errands while trying to make sense of Chicago’s dysfunctional public transit system. In fact, the public transit system nearly cost me a subletter.

[OK, now I’m on the plane and I’m in a fucking middle seat in the middle of the plane]

You see, I had been struggling for the last few weeks to find a subletter for my apartment while I was gone. I needed to cover the rent for at least 12 months, and almost every person who responded to my Craigslist or UchicagoMarketplace ads were asking for 2-4 month rentals. I’m not going to deal with 4 or 5 sequential subleases, thank you. Those who were willing to commit to somewhere near 12 months would either complain that they wanted something closer to downtown, or they would just flake out altogether.

[As it turns out, the aisle seat next to me is empty. Yay!]

So, when a young man responded to my ad late Saturday night and said he was interested in my place, I jumped at the opportunity to show the place to him. At the time, I was in Canada, dropping off my car with my parents, and then flying back to Chicago Sunday night. I was already planning to show my apartment to another set of potential subletters (who eventually flaked) on Sunday night, so I told him that we could meet either early Monday morning or late Monday evening. The morning didn’t work out, so we had to schedule for the evening; I had a meeting until 6pm and then a dinner-meeting with my dissertation advisor till 8pm, and so we planned to meet at my place around 9pm.

So, I was already tempting fate when I left Hyde Park around 8:30pm that night. I had to drop off a few final things with a friend before leaving Hyde Park, and then I needed to buy a few things from the local grocery store for gastronomic gifts for a friend in Paris. The bus to the grocery store took nearly 20 minutes to come, and the bus downtown from there took nearly 30 minutes to materialize. By the time I was on the bus toward downtown, it was almost 9:30 and the prospective subletter was calling me from in front of my building, saying that he had to leave so he could catch the last train back to his temporary abode. Fed up with the slow progress of the bus, I got off at the first stop downtown, hailed a cab, and told the subletter that I would give him money for a cab ride back to his place afterwards. It was an expensive pain in the ass, but I was desperate.

Thankfully, the subletter was a lovely guy who was patient, polite and a fan of house music (all good things in my books). He had just moved from Australia with nothing but a backpack and small luggage, so he was thrilled with the prospect of having an apartment that was already completely furnished. After sending a good deal of time discussiong the minutiae of the apartment, the building and the neighborhood, I sent him off with the desperate hope that he would take the place, and soon. I was only in town for another half-day.

So, the summary:

1. Fuck the underfunded and underserviced mass transit of Chicago for nearly killing my sublet; and,
2. He called me this morning to say that he wanted to take the apartment.

That was the beginning of a series of events today that brought on relief. Throughout the day—as I packed my bags, cleaned the apartment, did some last-minute laundry, organized the sublet paperwork, and dropped off my cable equipment—I felt the tightly-wound spring behind my eyes loosen a little. It wasn’t until the plane was cruising down the runway and taking off that I finally felt an overwhelming rush of relief, mixed with excited anticipation. There are still things to worry about, like how I’m going to find an apartment in Paris, but already I’ve survived a lot.

Oh, and by the way, none of the relief of today would’ve been possible without the help of my magnificent and currently favorite friend, Lauren. That girl drove all the way up to my place at noon, drove me around town as I ran some last-minute errands, and then dropped me off at the airport (with a detour at a diner). She took some pictures of us at the terminal drop-off area. Check 'em out! I totally have the "Bell's Palsy smile." Alright, time to drink some wine and try to get some sleep.

mutek_2008_Day2: Afternoon & EveningStuff

Experience 2: Street (sm)art

I had been working away at the café at a leisurely pace, thinking that I had until 20h00 that night to get whatever I needed done. However, I eventually realized that there were a bunch of interesting artists performing at the “Expérience” event going on at 17h00 that day. It was already 16h30, so I had no time to go to the hotel and change my backpack for my lighter party bag. So off I went, with my laptop and other paperwork on my back, to the SAT for a bit more dancing.

17h00-18h00: Dafluke

I arrived to the SAT space (where last night’s “Nocturne” had taken place) as Dafluke had just started performing. His set started off sounding rather eclectic, bringing in tracks that sounded like filter-house and Berlin-style minimal techno (see the first two videos below), but it eventually settled into a more straightforward tech-house sound (see the third video).

As I was hanging out and enjoying Dafluke’s set, I had another set of Chicago-related surprises. In total, another 7 people materialized unannounced from the Chicago scene. Yay! Mutek_2008 is turning into something of a Chicago reunion, including several former Chicago folks who are now living elsewhere in the world.

18h00-19h00: Barem

Although Barem’s set was not the one that would finally inspire me to dance despite my backpack and warm scarf, it was still a really good one. The overall sound was one of gradually-shifting minimal techno soundscapes, using pulsing synth tones with rounded envelopes and long, resonant bass kicks (see videos below, from the beginning of the set). As the set progressed, he incorporated more and more high-frequency clicks on off-beats (in the place of usual hi-hats). The overall sound, then, filled the low, middle and high frequency ranges with various layers (resonant bass kics, pulsing synths, syncopated clicks respectively) operating at various pulse levels / speeds (slowest, fastest, medium respectively).

I sould mention that if there was a real “star” of this particular event, it was the video work done by Doma of Argentina. He was responsible for all of the visuals you see in the clips I took of this event, and they totally kicked my ass. I just love his style of bright colours and clean lines, gliding in a very smooth way. Check out the arcs of stars in the backgrounds of the video for Barem.

19h00-20h00: Chic Miniature

Doma’s video for Chic Miniature’s set, however, was fucking awesome. As far as my visual aesthetics are concerned, it hit all of my pleasure receptors: bright colours, flat solid shapes and clean lines, iconic designs, cute creatures, gliding animation, and so on. I tried my best to capture all of this in the photos and video I took of the event, and hopefully you can get an idea of what I loved from the materials below. I was surprised by how much I liked it all.

Of course, it certainly helped that the music this video was accompanying was some of my favorite so far this festival. Chic Miniature is made up of Ernesto Ferreyra and Guillaume Coutu-Dumont, the latter of which was also at one point one half of the duo Egg (whose work I have enthused about before). Their sound was very much in the clickety-microhouse vein that I’ve been fond of for quite a while. The overall rhythmic “feel” was that of house, with a relatively thin texture and an emphasis on intricate high-frequency patterns (i.e., clicky stuff), thumping bass kicks and melodic basslines (as always, check out the video for a few samples).

NOTE: For a while, one of the members of Chic Miniature started improvising on what appeared to be a MIDI controller connected to conga samples. In other words: an electro-conga solo. This in and of itself was kind of amusing and added a certain bright and acidic tang to the set (yes, I'm very taste-driven), but this also inaugurated what some of us would later dub The Mutek of Congas. Also, there were a lot of distant, reverbed mariachi trumpets this weekend, but the ChicMiniature boys didn't go there.

This event was supposed to finish around 20h00, and the next event (another “A\Visions” concert) was going to start at the same time, giving me no chance to go back to the hotel to change and drop off my laptop and such. So, alas, I had to cut short my time with Chic Miniature to get back to the hotel in time. Even with the early departure from this event, I didn’t make the concert until about 20 minutes after the start.

A\Visions: Machine Music Revisited

Even though I left early from the previous show, I still was late getting back to the concert after my quick detour by the hotel, so I had to enter about halfway through the first performance, by Ben Frost. Although lovely and atmospheric in their own rights, I have to admit that the performances of both Frost and the following artist, Tim Hecker, were unexceptional; that is, I felt like both of their pieces were interchangeable with any other electroaccoustic piece you could find at some conservatory / art school. Having said that, they weren't unpleasant to listen to.

Partially discouraged by these lackluster performances, and partly out of desperate hunger, I ducked out before the final performance, that of Christian Fennesz. Of course, I would later find out that Fennesz's performance was fantastic and the video accompaniment was stunning. Grr.

On the upside, I had dinner in the restaurant attached to the Theâtre du Nouveau Monde, which included mushrooms sautéed in smoked lard and lamb tagine. Mercifully, the portions were small, so I could still dance later that night. As I wrapped up my dinner, the crowd was letting out of the concert, so I caught up with some of the Chicago crew and followed them over to the Métropolis for the main event of the evening.

Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I saw Marc Leclair a.k.a. Akufen outside smoking after the concert, and it took some serious self-control to not launch myself at him and be a totally annoying fan. I *heart* that guy's work.

mutek_2008_Day2: Daytime stuff and dancing

Although I hadn’t been out all that late (I got home around 2h30, I think), I had stayed up another hour or so backing up my data and doing the first round of photo triage (i.e., tossing out the bad ones, trying to clean up the good ones). So I slept in a bit today, then finally got myself cleaned up and dashed off to the first workshop of the day, which was on copyright issues. I skipped breakfast and coffee, figuring that the workshop would have coffee available like they did they day before, but THERE WAS NO COFFEE. For someone like me, this is a major tragedy; I was having trouble imagining how I would make it to lunch.

Panel 3: Copyright vs. Creativity

I’m not sure how I feel about the title of this panel, as it presumes an exclusivity to the two main terms, as if copyright must necessarily prevent creativity (while it certainly often has in practice, the main argument that anti-copyright activists make is that the original legislative philosophy of copyright was to encourage creativity). But all that aside, this panel was a pretty good one. It didn’t present any startlingly new perspectives or approaches to copyright issues, but it provided the enriched detail of personal accounts and such.

I was happy to see Larisa Mann (who I am certain I’ve seen at an ethno/musicology conference recently…), a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence who specializes on music copyright issues. She contributed not only a detailed knowledge of (US) copyright law, but also a handy overview of landmark copyright cases and a conceptual organization of the stakes involved in copyright issues. For example, she pointed out that distinctions between referencing / stealing in music can be made in aesthetic, moral and legal registers, and it’s not uncommon for each register to yield different outcomes (e.g., “that sample they borrowed sounds great there, and they acquired it legally, but it’s morally wrong because the samples are from colonial field archives and the aboriginal groups aren’t going to see a penny”; or “that sample is morally and legally OK, but it sounds like an unimaginative re-hash of the original sound source”). She also made an important historical point, observing that copyright law for most of the 20th century was concerned with infringement at the corporate / manufacturing level, since individuals didn’t have the technology available to make cheap copies of things (which changes drastically with the advent of digital media). As a result, extant copyright law isn’t very good at accounting for the decisions of individuals in private/domestic spheres.

Also interesting was the contribution of Jordan Wynnychuk, of Jimmy Proximity, a media company that has been developing an online service / software tool that allows users to remix copyrighted materials. Essentially, his company lands blanket copyright agreements by “closing the pipe” (his words) on certain uses of these recordings, thus helping control illegal copying. When pressed for details, Wynnychuk said that the software, Relab, doesn’t allow users to to upload their own sounds into the system or export the copyrighted materials or the resulting remixes into copiable audio files. Instead, the user downloads “remixable songs,” which are recordings in a proprietary format that only works with Relab software. On the upside, this format also gives access to individual layers of a recording—something most grey-market remixers could only dream of—but on the downside, your use of the materials is strongly limited, and the fruits of your own remixing labours are unavailable to you in a distributable format. The Relab service offers an online streaming option for distribution (e.g., like YouTube) if you want to share your remix with friends, and apparently if your remix is especially popular, there’s the possibility of distribution on other mediums…but that distribution is up to the people at Jimmy Proximity (i.e., they manage the rights too your remixes). And, it should go without saying, this system includes tracking software that allows Jimmy Proximity to monitor and report all use of the copyrighted materials.

In many ways, Wynnychuk’s project is an example of the kinds of partial solutions that are possible from within the extant copyright framework and in collaboration with large recording corporations. While this is certainly a compromise (and the subjection to surveillance is probably more than many remixers would tolerate), this sort of thing seems like an important intermediate step in the transformation of the recording industry and copyright that is pretty much inevitable. Nonetheless, Wynnychuk wasn’t really ready to speak about his project with the sort of pragmatic forthrightness that was called for, and so he came off sounding like the lame apologist for corporate copyright interests. The tone and phrasing of questions posed to him as the panel progressed placed him more and more into the category of “sell-out” or corporate huckster. It was sad but unsurprising that someone who is apparently trying to build some non-antagonistic bridges between the recording industry and the remix / mashup scene should be pushed into the position of corporate spokesperson.

[Note: upon seeing the picture he included in his mutek profile, I'm suddenly feeling less charitable toward him. It's funny how gestures of self-presentation can alter our levels of critique.]

Lunch and Such

Anyway, the panel was otherwise pretty interesting, but I still hadn’t had anything approaching breakfast and it was already lunchtime. I did a bit of research into the location of a well-recommended poutine diner, Patati-Patata (here's another review of the place) and headed off in that direction. That required me to climb several blocks of rue St.-Laurent uphill, but I at least got a good look at the Main disctrict of Montréal, to the east of McGill and the Mont-Royal (the main hill that gives Montréal it’s name). The strip was a mix of Queen Street West and College Street West, with a series of rather upscale modern bistros and cafés, followed by a series of more “alternative” boutiques, followed by what appeared to be a large portion of a Jewish neighborhood. I passed Schwartz’s Delicatessen, which is apparently THE place to get the typical Montreal Smoked Meat. The line-up was nearly half a block long to get a sandwich, so I made a note to check it out at some later time.

About half an hour after leaving the festival, I got to Patati-Patata and had myself a fantastic poutine with roast beef (and beer, of course). This makes three poutiness in the three meals that I’ve had since landing in Montréal! Clearly, I need to take a break tonight. Nonetheless, I enjoyed scarfing down the poutine at the bar while marking some student work that I had brought along (oh yes, this is a “working” trip).

Coming out of lunch, I realized that had still not had a drop of caffeine all day. The carb-and-protein-and-fat punch of poutine certainly helped me out, but I was still in desperate need of chemical assistance. So off I went back down rue St.-Laurent until I got to one of a clearly popular chain of coffee shops called Café Dêpot, which offered free WiFi. I set up camp there with a coffee and an electrical outlet and got to work writing up last night’s outings and preparing audio and video.

mutek_2008_Day1 : Nighttime concerts/parties

The mutek festival is organized into four layers of events: DIGI_SECTION, panels and workshops in the morning and early afternoon; EXPERIENCE, studio performances by artists in the early evening (17-19h); A\Visions concert performances by audio and video artists, usually of the more noisy, ambient and abstract sort—coming very close to “academic” electroaccoustic genres (20h-23h); and NOCTURNE club performances, almost exclusively in the form of live P.A., by the sorts of artists one is more likely to find at clubs and “Techno” events.

I had just finished attending the events connected to this first layer (DIGI_SECTION), and I was tired, had a ton of notes to summarize and turn into blog material, and my computer’s battery was again nearly dead. So I decided to skip the EXPERIENCE event that afternoon and go back to the hotel. Besides, the events later tonight promised some partying, and I wasn’t going to do that with a backpack full of stuff and a laptop.

A\Visions: Cinematic Spirits

I spent some time writing notes, backing up my data on my new, super-hot 1-TeraByte external hard drive (a WD MyBook, which is a stupid name, but it’s totally awesome), and taking a brief nap. Once I was in somewhat better condition—and after grabbing yet more poutine at La Belle Province—I headed off to the concert event that evening (A\Visions), which was dubbed “Cinematic Spirits.” As you might expect, the entire concert involved combinations of audio and video performances (sometimes by the same person, but usually by a duo of artists).

The first act (link to mutek profile) was a duo of Nokami (a.k.a. Eric Filion) and Sans Soleil (a.k.a. Michael Trommer), both Canadian artists. The work they presented was called Semiosis, which sort of produced an involuntary groan in me, as I feel like collage-based “media art” that riffs on notions from the field of semiotics is so played out these days. Nonetheless, despite the “Look! Layers and layers of visual and audio elements represent the endless chain of signification!” the sound and video were quite nice in their own rights. The video was mostly in black-and-white, making use of multiple layers of images that shifted and rotated at varying speeds and angles. There was also heavy use of “morphing” software, with x-rays of bones morphing into each other or photos of (what appeared to be) Cambodian prisoners blurring into each other. The music reflected this, using what sounded like lots of gradual layering to create slow-moving masses of textured sound.

The next act (mutek profile), Freida Abtan (from Canada as well), presented a solo video called The Hands of the Dancer. This was probably my favourite performance of the evening, although I had to slip on ear plugs halfway through it. The video was in very lush, over-saturated colour, showing dancers whose movement is represented by a series of frames blurred into each other. As the piece progresses, the video focuses more and more on the sinuous hand and arm movements of a female dancer (often duplicated across the screen into a crowd). At this point, a lot of the blurring turns into distortions of the sort that turn the screen into a shimmering oil slick. The audio part of the performance took a different tack on “shimmering,” focusing on a mixture of layered voices in miasmic clouds and metallic scrapings and other “glitchy” sounds. Although a bit abrasive at times, the overall performance was really lovely (click on the mutek profile above to hear an excerpt from the piece).

The performance of the third act, Németh & Hess, from Austria / USA, bored me to tears. The piece, entitled simply FILM, involved everything but: one performer was on an acoustic drum kit, while the other performer was on a table covered with sound-synthesis gear (notably, what looked like some analogue devices). The piece took the form of a series of episodes, each one 5-10 minutes long, where the person working the electronic stuff would generate a set of sounds, upon which the percussionist would elaborate. I found the whole piece far too slow-moving—and I’m a fan of minimalism, so I have a high tolerance for these sorts of things. The artists spent too much time dwelling on each sound-idea that they introduced, and they didn’t develop these ideas in a way that went anywhere. It felt like a series of near-random gestures.

The final performance (mutek profile) of the event was by Rechenzentrum, from Germany, who presented a piece called Silence. The piece started as the sort of “gentle” layering of atmospheric sounds found in the first piece of the evening, but by 10 minutes into the piece, things began to pick up. This duo was probably the only act to use loops of beats as part of their performance, which created a dynamic contrast with their more atmospheric sections. The video for their performance remained mostly in black and white (with one substantial exception), starting with shifting images of forests, which quickly became more abstract. As with the other artists mentioned here, you can go to their profile on mutek to hear some samples of what they do.

Although I refrained from taking pictures (so many people were using flash during the first act, the management actually made an announcement about it before the next one), I did manage to take a bit of stealthy video of Rechenzentrum’s act, which captures some of their visuals as well as audio. You have to imagine a very resonant bass in the place of the weak thumping captured by the camera.

Nocturne 2: Modern Hypnotists

As the concert let out, I ran into a handful of people from the Chicago scene, which was a pleasant surprise. I had only known of about 2 or 3 people who were going to be here this weekend, and already I was seeing more and more of my Chicago crew in Montréal. I wandered over to Métropolis, thinking that tonight’s club event would be in the same place as all the other ones, but it was in fact at the SAT tonight; in other words, I nearly wandered into some corporate dinner at Métropolis before I took a closer look at my ticket. Thankfully, both locations are within one block of each other.

23h00-23h50: artificiel.process ("Martin.Tétrault")

This opening act had just started when I arrived to the venue. As far as I could tell, the act consisted of one guy (Martin Tétrault, I believe) using and abusing playback devices while another guy (of the art collective, artificiel) recorded both audio and video of the acts and turned them into a sort of A/V collage. Tétrault had this awesome mutant phonograph with 4 tonearms (i.e., 4 needles) and a series of materials (plywood, felt, rough metals) cut into the shape of LPs. He would run the tonearms over these surfaces, often scratching the “records” and even bashing the tonearms onto the surfaces or into each other.

The resulting sounds were mostly noisy and percussive, so the collage that resulted tended toward the stuttering, chaotic “breakcore” genre. Rhythmic gestures would emerge in fits and starts, but they would never really coalesce into metric patterns.

Overall, I liked the concept of the performance a lot, and the quality and texture of the sounds were intriguing at first, but it stopped being interesting about 5 minutes later, as the entire theme of the performance seemed to be “Hey look at this thing I’m doing here! Isn’t it wild?”

23h50-0h50: Christian Vogel

There was definitely a sort of arc to the evening, beginning with more experimental (read: undanceable) music and migrating toward a more dancefloor-friendly sound. Christian Vogel’s set was definitely somewhere in the middle; he used (relatively) conventional sound synthesis and sampling (via laptop) to create a sound texture that first sounded a lot like what I had heard earlier in the “A\Visions” concert, but then transitioned to a looping, metric organization more similar to dance music. The tempo remained at a somewhat awkward pace for dancing, and his use of bass percussion tended to be more of a bass rumble then a well-articulated pattern that would give a dancer something to work with. Overall, the set was good (see video below), although I wasn’t really inspired to do anything more than drink beer and stand there. Having said that, I got the impression that the point wasn’t necessarily to encourage anybody to dance.

Instead, what I mostly ended up doing was wandering around the place with a beer in my hand, admiring the lovely exposed-wall warehouse feel of the place and running into yet more Chicago people.

0h50-2h00: Sleeparchive

Alas, my camera ran out of batteries halfway through the Vogel set, which is really tragic, because Sleeparchive’s set was really great. It started off in a atmospheric / beatless sound-world similar to Vogel and Rechenzentrum, but after about 20 minutes it shifted suddenly into rather bass-heavy minimal techno. Although there were occasional moments of breaks (i.e., asymmetrical bass kick patterns), he mostly cleaved to a 4x4 pattern and really got the crowd moving.

By the end of the evening, as they killed the sound and turned up the lights, some of the Chicago crew were still looking to party (Serena? I’m looking at you), but I was dead tired from getting up early that morning. I wandered back home through the “colourful” stretch of Ste.-Cathrine and back to my wonderfully ghetto hotel.

mutek_2008_Day1 : Daytime workshops and panels

Pre-Game

I got up rather early, put myself together, and then headed out the door to the main mutek site, SAT (Société des arts téchnologiques), to pick up my weekend pass. The breakfast service was apparently just finishing in my hotel, which is just as well, since it appeared to be a collection of stale croissants and bad coffee.

The trip to the SAT took far less time than I had expected, so I actually arrived there before they had opened the box office. They were nice enough to give me my tickets, although I would have to come back later to get my photo-pass. I wandered around the neighborhood, discovering the Complexe Desjardins, which is just one part of the mammoth underground network of shopping malls in downtown Montréal, as well as the various sex shops and strip joints on the nearby rue Ste.-Catherine. Classy!

Among other things, I got these excellent photos of storefronts on rue Ste.-Catherine. Note that “dépanneur” is something like a convenience store.

Workshop 1: Introducting the Tenori-On

While waiting for the workshop to start, I played with one of the Tenori-Ons on display in the café-bar area, and it certainly seems like a fun and potentially powerful tool. I like the hands-on interface, using a 16x16 square of buttons to control almost everything.

The workshop itself was pretty interesting. The speaker gave a historical overview of electronic instruments, including a few devices that I hadn’t heard of. After that, he went into a more nuts-and-bolts introduction of the instrument itself, showing how to use its various compositional modes and then how to make it work with Ableton Live and MaxMSP through the magic of MIDI signals.

Although I would probably need more time with this instrument to develop a deeper assessment of the object, it certainly is the kind of geek-porn that music nerds love, and it appears to offer a lot of creative opportunities that other devices don’t. Also, the fact that all you need to know to use its basic functionalities is the ability to recognize spatial patterns makes it really attractive for those without formal musical training.

I’m not going into detail about the function and use of the Tenori-On, since Yamaha already has a really sexy website that features everything you need to know. Apparently, the instrument will only be available by mail order for the foreseeable future. Huh.

Lunch

Guess which restaurant is in the Complexe Desjardins, just two blocks from the main hub of mutek? St. Hubert.

Guess what St. Hubert serves? Poutine (and lots of chicken)

Guess what goes well with poutine? Beer.

Guess what else was available right next to my table? An electriclal outlet.

This last one might not seem so exciting, but I had exhausted all of the power in my laptop’s batteries during the morning session by surreptitiously recording the entire workshop through the internal microphone of my laptop while I was taking notes. The results were mediocre and tinny, but good enough to serve as an archive for later reference. The program I used for the recording (Audacity) worked fine, although I had problems during the afternoon session.

Anyway, I parked myself at St. Hubert in the “resto-bar” section, near an outlet, and re-charged my laptop while eating a delicious poutine with chicken in it. No doubt there is better poutine to be had in town, but that totally hit the spot.

Panel 2: The Ecology of Festivals: Beyond Filling Venues

This panel featured a collection of people tied to music festivals—mostly electronic music festivals—who were trying to talk about some of the more intangible / qualitative goals of music festivals, like public awareness, legitimacy, social organizing, etc.

The panel itself started off well enough, with an introduction by each speaker about their organization, why their organization started in the first place, and how their present work corresponds to those original goals. Some of the most interesting stuff in this part of the discussion centered around the sorts of entanglements that these groups found themselves in with public funding bodies, institutions, politics and so on. Mat Schulz, from the Unsound Festival based in Krakow, Poland, talked about taking advantage of the E.U.’s political interests in Belarus to accumulate funding for a “satellite” music festival in Minsk. Leo de Boisgisson, based in Beijing, talked about the unique history of youth culture and music in late-20th-century China and told a story about being forced to organize events in collaboration with state cultural apparatchiks and even the army.

But the panel soon shifted into a sort of self-congratulatory pity-party / love-in, organized around their heroic efforts to champion “experimental” electronic music to a largely unappreciative / undereducated public. The underlying assumption among most of the panelists is that “bad” popular music like “mainstream” EDM or pop is popular because people aren’t aware of the aesthetic goldmine that is “experimental” electronic music; if they only had the opportunity to experience it—say, through a music festival—the proverbial scales would fall from their eyes they would be freed from stupefying grip of mass culture.

Clearly, what I’m recounting here is a familiar form of cultural/class elitism, using the management of aesthetic taste as a sort of social hygiene. I only need to change a few terms to make this indistinguishable from the Massen/Kulturkritik of Adorno and other commentators participating in the Frankfurt School. The panelists never went as far as to articulate their desires and disappointments in these terms, but instead mobilized vocabularies of curatorial practice and pedagogy, gesturing toward an under-defined “commercial” music industry as the source of the feeling of urgency around this project of public edification.

There are ethical complexities around using a pedagogical model for public/social organizing, not least among them being the fact that a pedagogical relation assumes an individual or group who knows more (or knows better), and another individual or group who needs to learn (for their own good—read: sometimes against their will). What seems like a benign desire to “raise awareness” or expand horizons can slide into a sort of condescending elitism that is rarely well-received or effective. This is substantially different from a model of community-building, profit-making, preservation of tradition, or pleasure/fun (all of which have their advantages and disadvantages).

What is ironic/depressing about this is that most of these panelists bemoaned, in the same breath, the of marginalization of Electronic Dance Music at the hands of The Academy (i.e., academic institutions). “Academic” music-making (especially post-tonal compositions) have used labels and poetics of the avant-garde and modernism to justify the exclusion of most popular musics while explaining their own relative lack of mass appeal. Indeed, the lack of mass popularity became a mark of distinction through often explicit elitism: if the public (read: working class) doesn’t like it, it must be Art. So it was disappointing for me to see the re-appearance of these discourses within the EDM community, using “experimental” in the place of “avant-garde” to divide us into cultural haves and have-nots.

Part of what facilitated this blind spot around practices of elitism, I think, was a concomitant blind spot around the interpenetration of “academic” and “commercial” spheres in the world of EDM. Jan Rohlf (representing Transmediale), for example, opened his comments on his organization in Berlin by stating that there is a music scene in Berlin that sat uncomfortably between the “academic” and “commercial” spheres. When answering a later question about collaboration with institutions, Rohlf expressed resistance to the idea, raising the spectre of cultural misappropriation by exploitative outsiders. This resonated with an entirely-unquestioned idea about what (and who) lies outside of EDM communities: the academics can never understand, the corporations can never have good intentions. This supposition of completely separate (and antagonistic) worlds fails to account for the increasing number of EDM fans and participants who have entered into academic institutions to make sense of their own lives within EDM scenes (like me). Similarly, those people in the EDM scenes who have moved into large-scale promotion and above-ground media production—in the interest of developing a scene to which they belong—are entirely left out of this account. Furthermore, to fail to recognize that many EDM artists are art-school- or university-trained (although perhaps not in music) is simply disingenuous, as is the presumption that electronic music, dance music, and electronic dance music were every completely separate from sites of commerce and capital.

[To be fair to Rohlf, he was also the person on the panel who came closest to expressing a desire for music festivals that build communities of care and intimacy.]

So, as you can tell, this annoyed me a bit. I was too self-conscious about my facial disfigurement to really ask a question (having half your face paralyzed makes speaking uncomfortable and continually embarrassing), and I was disappointed to see everyone on the panel and in the audience in such unquestioning agreement: “We, exempt from the stigma of intellectualism and commercialism, need to defend/promulgate our tastes against mass culture, and we deserve support for our projects (preferably in the form of grants or ticket sales).”

Anyway, with this depressive moment over, I headed out of the panel, said hi to a frew folks from the Chicago scene who had recently arrived, and then headed back to my hotel to work on my notes. Alas, My audio application, Audacity, had crashed halfway through the second panel, and when I re-started it, the program started recording the latter half of the panel on top of the previous recording. At the end of the panel, when I tried to at least save the last half of the panel, Audacity somehow deleted everything and left me with nothing. Fantastic. Ah well, at least I took meticulous notes.

Dear Inappropriately-Dressed Woman:

You are totally awesome. In a brisk Montréal morning, you were wearing a bright-red Che Guevara t-shirt stretched over your ample frame, black shiny stretch-shorts that stopped just above the knee, black-and-red-striped socks just below the knee, and clunkly black boots. The fact that you were totally unremarkable to your compatriots on the street gives me a comfort that is hard to describe.