Phew. I’m so behind on blogging, it’s not funny. It’s been a busy week, and then the weekend was even busier. Anyway, here’s the run-down for Saturday.
I slept in after last night’s outing, and then quietly worked on my proposal revisions (and a bit of cooking, certainly) until the early evening. A friend of mine was returning to Mauritius in a few days, so she decided to have her last “night on the town” tonight, to coincide with the Parisian Nuit Blanche events.
Nuit Blanche is a public art event that started in Paris several years ago and has now been reproduced in similarly-named festivals all around the world (including Toronto!). The name comes from the French expression, “white night,” which also means a sleepless night. Large and usually spectacular art installations are put together all through the city in both outdoor and indoor spaces, and you have the entire night (until sunrise) to see everything. Public transit is usually augmented for the duration of the event, although—in true French fashion—I heard from others that the métro was still closed and that the buses were a disaster. I used the Vélib bike-sharing system, which was stretched to capacity this night. I had to pass three Vélib stations before I found one that had a bike in it.
Anyway, I headed over to my friend’s place for an apéro (aperitif drink, although also used in France to refer to some drinks and finger-foods usually done between work and the dinner hour). As the rest of her friends gathered at her place, our “best intentions” to be moving about the city by 20h00 turned into something of a disaster. As we waited for more friends, we had more drinks, and got less and less…capable of the sort of organization required to move as a group. By 23h00, we were finally moving, sort of.
We skipped the display at Montparnasse (which was supposedly quite lovely) and headed toward the Marais, since we were going to finish our night at Le Pin Up, where Fantômette was spinning. On the way over, at the Concorde métro station, we were treated to a skinny boy in typical H&M fashion, dancing like a fool to all the hits from the 2008 Eurovision contest. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t an official part of the Nuit Blanche festival, but we were pretty amused by his antics.
We made it to the Swedish Cultural Centre, where there was this lovely installation that took over the entire courtyard. There were zillions of thin white strings suspended above the courtyard, each one weighed down with a small metal nut to keep it roughly vertical. Nonetheless, every time the wind shifted, the whole sea of white fibers would move and drift in a really lovely way. Also, the Swedish café in the building was open, selling traditional Swedish cakes that were Swedish-awesome.
From there, we had wanted to go to Châtelet to see the tour St.-Jacques (St. Jacob’s Tower), which apparently had some projections on it. However, it started to rain and we decided to call it a night and head over to Le Pin Up to see Fantô. The rest of the night was a lot of fun, and I discovered a “special” drink of the bar, called “Le Pin-Up Bubble,” which involves ice, champagne, vodka and violet syrup. Surprisingly delicious.
Dammit. I had written up a long blog post and saved it, and then apparently I did something stupid while moving around my files and now I see that I’ve lost the entry for Oct 3. So here it is again. Obviously, this will be a bit shorter than the original.
So today was the day that I was going to check out the nearby open-air market, on boulevard Richard-Lenoir. It’s open every Tuesday and Friday, and it looked like it would be a pretty big one. Upon arriving there, I saw that it was about the same size as the Place des Fêtes market I used to go to, only arranged in long rows along the middle of the boulevard and maybe a bit more expensive.
Part of the higher prices had to do with the fact that there were more specialty booths. For example, there was a woman there selling nothing but mushrooms (that looked SO GOOD), including hard-to-find Korean mushrooms and super-expensive cêpes. There was also a cheesemonger (one among many) who had a more narrow but very well-selected range of cheeses, with better prices than most at the market. I got this really buttery cheese with no particular name that is apparently a specialty of Les Vosges, some vieux Comté, and a couple of Rocamadours (small discs of very fresh goat cheese).
I was in the mood for ceviche, so I headed over to a fishmonger that looked credible and asked for some help selecting a fish. Usually I would make ceviche with Peruvian corvina, but that’s pretty much impossible to find here. So I told him what I was making and described the kind of fish I usually need, but as soon as he heard it was “raw” a little lightbulb went on over his head and he decided that what I really meant was sushi. So then he started showing me his tuna and salmon, neither of which are good for ceviche. Finally, I just took some swordfish, which is a reliable standby for ceviche.
I had trouble finding some properly hot peppers for my ceviche, but luckily I came across a Senegalese merchant selling creole food. I bought a bunch of accras de morue (cod fritters), and along with it he gave me a container of super-spicy habañero pepper sauce. Mmm.
I headed home and busied myself making ceviche and putting away my groceries, worked a bit more on my proposal revisions, and then went out to take care of some errands and do some laundry.
By the time evening came around, I had a dinner date with a friend who had recently arrived to Paris as well as with one of his friends, so I grabbed a bike from the Vélib station near my place and headed over. My friend was over near the Ecole Normale Supérieure, which is near the bottom of rue Mouffetard. I had picked the route that seemed the most direct on the map, but I didn’t realize until I was pedaling my way up a steep incline that the route went up and over the hill upon which the Pantheon sits. Ack. Next time I’ll use Googlemaps’s “Terrain” setting to check before heading out.
Anyway, we met and headed over to rue Mouffetard (known as being the cheapest street in Paris for restaurant food) and had a pretty decent meal. Considering the blah food I had here two years ago, I was pleased to get something that was edible this time.
From there, we were still in the mood to go out, so we started walking to the Marais to see what was going on. After some discussion and a lot of wandering, we found our way to Yono in the Marais. We had a (rather expensive) drink, and then decided to keep moving. One of the guys in our group really wanted to go to a club that he had read about, called OpA near Bastille, so off we went.
The club was a pretty good example of what a “mainstream” club in Paris looks like: polished décor, surprisingly small dance floor, bottle service taking over most of the seating areas, an almost exclusively hetero crowd, guys being very assertive in their advances and girls being defensive, and a random mix of “electro” hits as soundtrack. To the DJs credit, he was actually beat-matching the tracks and making something out of it, but the selection was still crap. Nonetheless, I amused myself by again observing groups homosocial groups of (presumably) heterosexual men engaging in intense homoerotic play while throwing themselves at any female within sniffing distance. I had just been talking about this with my companions earlier that night, so I felt a bit vindicated by having some empirical proof to show them.
Work, again, was busy but I can feel things tapering off. I managed to completely spoil my diet during the day, thanks to some free food kicking around. There had been a conference that day and the director had ordered a ton of very nice hors d’oeuvres and the like, and there weren’t enough people at the conference to eat it all. So, of course, they brought in the grad students to eat up the leftovers. I certainly didn’t complain, considering that I had planned to skip lunch, but I felt kinda gross and overfed for the rest of the afternoon. I also sat in on a wine and cheese tasting hosted that afternoon, so I was pretty damn full by the end of the day. Mind you, I was pretty impressed with myself. I drank 5 glasses of wine during the tasting and didn’t even notice. My wine tolerance is back!
After my success with Vélib last night, I decided to try my luck getting home from work. This was a considerably longer trek, but I was heartened by the fact that there was a system of dedicated bike paths that led from my door, along the Canal St. Martin / Boulevard Richard Lenoir, past Bastille and along the river to where I work. Besides, the trip would be mostly along flat terrain.
So, at around 18h00, I headed over to the nearest Vélib stand and grabbed a bike. The map I had consulted said that there were bike paths, but it wasn’t clear about whether they were one-way or two-way paths. The bike paths themselves had obviously been built over time in a piecemeal way, so I sometimes found myself having to backtrack, cross over to the other side of the street, or just join the insane automobile traffic.
All of this was complicated by the fact that we were apparently experiencing some sort of flash hurricane in Paris, which began about 5 minutes into my bike ride. First the wind nearly flayed the skin off my face (and nearly threw me off the bike and into traffic), then the rain started pelting down into my eyes, soaking my sweater and my bag, and then the rest of the ride was a lovely combination of both.
So, the weather was not on my side and I still didn’t know the route (and I nearly had a heart attack trying to go around Bastille at rush hour with wind and rain on my little bike), but I still made it home in 30 minutes. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make better time in the future! Hooray for bike transport, I tell ya.
With the rain still pouring down, I got some bread and some eggs and then dragged myself upstairs and tried to dry off. I spent the rest of the evening FINALLY having a quiet night at home. Yay!
After another marathon day at work, I ambled home and got ready to head over to a colleague’s house for dinner. She was planning to make raclette, so I went to the somewhat upscale-looking wine shop across the street from me and asked for some recommendations. I left with a bottle of red wine of the Côtes du Luberon appellation (from the south-eastern extreme of Rhône wine region, east of Avignon), along with a bottle of Burgundian wine for my own consumption. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I’m back in the land of cheap and high-quality wine. Those two bottles cost me 24€ in total, and each one would easily run $40-50 in the US.
I headed over to her place and had a great dinner with her and her husband and a mutual friend of theirs. At one point, their friend annoyed me with a rather crude deployment of the Paradox of Voting to support his complaint that the voting masses (in this context, read: Americans) are stupid. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to articulate my rebuttal really well in French, which I guess shows me that I need more practice in academic / argumentative French. Also, it didn’t help that he was constantly calling me an American—despite my frequent corrections—and would make comments like, “I don’t much like that art exhibit, but it’s good enough for an American,” with this tone of voice that implied that he thought I would be delighted to hear this. Ugh.
Anyway, as I left after dinner, my colleague told me that there was a Vélib station nearby. Since she lived at the top of a hill in the 19th arrondissement, I could just grab one of those bikes and coast all the way home, rather than schlepping to the nearest subway station. I wasn’t sure if my year-long subscription had gone through yet, but when I dropped my Navigo card on the little card reader next to one of the locked bikes, the light turned green and the bike was unlocked. Yay!
The ride home was indeed super-easy, taking maybe 5 minutes to coast downhill. It took a few minutes to find the Vélib station closest to my place, but eventually I did and headed home. My project for tomorrow: take the Vélib home from work.
Well, my original plan today was to get home from work and relax and generally unwind, but nothing of the sort. Devon, a good buddy that I know through my Totally Rad Designer Friend, Amy Kwong (of SmittenKitten fame), had been in town this last weekend, and tonight was his last night. I hadn’t been able to hang out with him last weekend, since I was in Lille, and he is going to leave tomorrow (Wednesday). So tonight was the only opportunity I had to hang out with him. I sent him a text message from work and he told me that he was going out to a drag show with friends, so we made plans to meet up later that night.
Work was hell today. I’m still not one to blog in detail about my work, but I’ll tell you that it was deeply unpleasant and I left work 3 hours after I had planned to, exhausted. Thankfully, at least, I got a lot of difficult things worked out, so I’m hoping that this will make things easier tomorrow and for the rest of the week. This is the first week of having the full host of autumn-quarter students here, so that’s why things are as crazy as they are right now.
Anyway, I made my way home much later than I had expected. I limped home around 18h00, packed some leftovers into my maw, and then ran back out the door to meet Devon and his crew at 19h30. We met at this bar in the gay district of Paris called Cox (yes, that’s right), where we had a drink before wandering through a bunch of side-streets to get to a bar / theater called Tango. The event, apparently, was a solo drag performance by a queen from Montréal, Mado, doing a show called “Les Invasions Bâtards” (a play on the Denys Arcand film, Les Invasions Barbares). The price was 20€ for a two-hour show, which made me re-think my complaints about cover charges for techno events. Yeesh.
The show was mostly pretty amusing, especially her deft changes to the lyrics of Québécois folk songs to turn them into bawdy and queer parodies. On the other hand, her “French people do this! Québécois do that!” stand-up got old really fast. Perhaps the highlight of the night, though, was her medley of Québécois pop songs that have lyrics that are so awful, you don’t actually need to do anything to make them a parody. Pretty damn amusing.
After that, we all stumbled out and the other boys went off to find falafels, while I went home for some well-deserved sleep.
So this is another case of a day that was totally taken over by “current events.” I came home from a relatively tiring day of work, planning to get some dissertation work done and maybe relax a bit.
Instead, I got home and turned on the TV to discover that the bill proposing the financial rescue plan in the US had been defeated in the House of Congress, which was a surprise. After a week of super-intensive work on this plan, under the threat of a economic meltdown, this bill was supposed to pass ASAP.
Anyway, this political implosion was just breaking as I turned on the TV—CNN was broadcasting the eerie silence on the Congress floor as the votes were still being counted—so I spent the rest of the night watching the drama unfold. Oh, and maybe I blogged a bit. But mostly I just watched the DRAMA.
Well, after a night of partying, I realized that I had done something really stupid. You see, my plan was to return on Sunday (today), so my hotel reservation ended today. But when I was shopping for train tickets, I picked the least cheap return ticket, which was at 22h00. Have you figured out what’s wrong with this picture?
That’s right. Check-out time from my hotel was at 12h00, so I had 10 hours to kill. Add to this the fact that I didn’t get to bed until around 6h00 or 7h00, and you can see what kind of day I had ahead of me. I got up around 11h00, took a quick shower, packed my bags, and then checked out and asked the concierge to hold my luggage.
At this point, all I wanted to do was sleep more, and that was the one thing I couldn’t do. I could go grab a coffee in a café (which I did), I could haul out my laptop and work on my field notes (which I did), and I could wander around and take photos (which I did), but I couldn’t put down my belongings and just take a nap.
Lille, at least, is a really lovely city, with some great architecture and very friendly people. So here are some pictures I took of the downtown area near the train station, as taken by my sleep-deprived self.
Thankfully, I eventually had a bright idea. What if I exchanged my ticket for an earlier train? I know that my train ticket to Lille on Friday was at the “Prem’s” rate, which allows absolutely no exchange or refund, but I distinctly recalled paying a bit more for the Sunday evening return trip. So off I went to the train station, where I used one of the SNCF’s surprisingly easy-to-use exchange kiosks to exchange my ticket. Alas, I had to pay another 30€ to exchange the ticket this late, but at least I was going home at 18h00, instead of 22h00.
When 18h00 rolled around, I got on the train and got ready to enjoy a 1.5-hour nap. Then a young couple sat down across the aisle from me with a toddler that had just started using language and hadn’t yet learned social norms about volume. This is unfortunate but understandable; the fact that the parents showed no interest in actually teaching their child to speak at a reasonable level drove me and everyone else in the train nuts. It wasn’t until I got off the train in Paris, grumpy and sleep-deprived, that I recalled that I had brought earplugs with me for the music festival. Dammit.
On my way through Gare du Nord to get to the métro, I passed this rather unlikely shop in the underground walkway that sold specialties from Auvergne (read: dry sausages and cheese). Unable to say no to well-prepared French dry sausage, I stopped to try a sample and ask the guy about his wares. This is clearly prime sausage-selling season, as I left his place with two plain sausages and two peppered sausages for 15€. And keep in mind that these are big, half-kilo sausages. Yay! Porky goodness.
I trundled my way home and dropped off my stuff, and then zipped over to my friend’s place—the one that took me in at the beginning of the month when I was homeless—to return the spare set of keys I had been using at the time. On the way home, I realized that I was starving and only had a big pile of dry sausage to eat. I took a quick walk in my neighborhood and discovered (to my delight) that there was a rather respectable-looking sushi place around the corner, called Sushi West. I’ve always been very wary of sushi in Paris, having had some pretty awful experiences, but I’ve heard since my return that things have improved.
Sushi West’s menu was certainly geared toward conservative Frenchy palates. Salmon and Tuna was in everything and most “sushi combo” plates were made of exclusively those two fish. There were lots of “special” maki (rolls) that were filled with pretty standard fillings (green onions, cucumber, oshinko, tempura shrimp, avocado, etc.). And, most disappointingly, there were two maki labeled “very hot!” that were, in fact, tasteless; I’m not even talking “mildly hot,” but rather “did you forget to put hot sauce in this?”
The whole thing was pretty expensive, but a good price for Paris. I paid 25€ for a 25-piece sashimi set (with mackerel and sea-bass included in the combination along salmon and tuna), a cucumber roll, and a spicy tuna roll (super disappointing). The sashimi was fresh-tasting and generously portioned, but the rolls were lackluster. Nonetheless, everything tasted very fresh and dependable, so I took a take-out menu home with me.
I slept in until about 13h00 or 14h00. I have a hazy memory of the cleaning lady barging into my room about 12h00 and then hastily retreating, but I actually got out of bed about an hour or so later.
I had this great idea: I’ll take my computer in my backpack and head over to a café overlooking the largest city square and work on my blog notes. But there were a few problems: 1) there was some sort bizarre open-air aerobics class going on in the square that involved blasting really horrible trance (EDM music) across the square, so there was no way I was going to sit in a terrace and get any work done; 2) when I found a café on a side-street that seemed promising, I opened my computer to discover that it hadn’t actually charged during the night. Boo! Well, I finished my coffee, enjoyed the brief moment of sunshine, and then went back to the hotel and kept on working from there.
There was a roundtable discussion scheduled at 19h00 today, hosted by a philosopher called Yves Michaud, at the auditorium in the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Palace of Fine Arts). The philosopher has been apparently married to a woman from Ibiza for decades, currently lives there, and has seen the emergence and solidification of the year-round Ibiza party scene. He’s apparently writing a book of memoirs and observations on the subject, so he decided to hold this roundtable today on the subject of hedonism as a philosophy / ethic and its importance in EDM communities.
When I was heading over to the event, I had somehow forgotten that it was planned to be a round-table, and I was bracing myself for one very self-satisfied “public intellectual” holding forth for a couple of hours on a scene that he’s merely been next to. Thankfully, this was a real round-table, and the guy himself was functioning more as a moderator, so he didn’t actually speak that much, aside from posing questions and guiding the direction of conversation.
Otherwise, there were 4 speakers, one a philosopher who specializes in epicurianism and hedonism, one a classics scholar with a specialty in Latin philosophy, one the head of the local general counsel that sponsored the N.A.M.E. Festival, and one journalist that had been a “specialist” in parties and partying. As a result, the discussion was actually pretty interesting; each of the speakers geared their discussion toward a generalist’s knowledge, and they each had an interesting perspective to give on hedonism. I probably most appreciated the philosopher and the classics scholar, as they both historicized the development of hedonism and Epicureanism and explained the differences between them and what these words might mean in the 21st century.
Interestingly enough, for the first 75% of the discussion, nobody discussed illicit drug use, despite the obvious and frequent connections to hedonism (in a negative way, usually). When the moderator finally pointed it out, the rest of the discussion for the rest of the event circled endlessly around that topic. Most of them came out with the now-standard arguments for an alternate approach to drugs than full abstinence / scare tactics: harm reduction is more important; hyperbolic warnings about drugs make the entire drug education project seem disconnected with reality; the “profile” of a drug-user in politics has little correlation to the sorts of casual recreational users that make up a large portion of the EDM scene (and many other scenes); alcohol is a more potent poison than many of these drugs; etc. While most of these are good arguments and I certainly didn’t disagree with them, they didn’t really add a finessed or expanded argument from their particular positions of expertise. What does the history of philosophy tell us about tolerance for the use of intoxicants? How do various philosophies make sense of desire and need and pleasure?
The only major disappointment was during the Q&A session at the end, when some woman raised her hand and asked whether the “tribal dance style” of EDM parties might show some connection with primitive cultures. Gah. I realize that there’s a whole sub-section of the EDM scene that sees itself this way, but the unexamined colonial desire embedded in that sort of narrative is just too much for me to swallow. Thankfully, the moderator jumped in before anyone else could respond and explained to her very succinctly why the dance practices of EDM and “primitive” (shudder) communities are only superficially similar.
From there, I headed back to the hotel, grabbed a greasy but satisfying kebab on the way, and then relaxed in my hotel for a little while, until Fantô and about half of the Frenchy Krew were ready to head out for some pre-partying (the other half stayed in and wanted to sleep a bit more before the main event). We went to At Home, a bar we had visited briefly the night before. We hung out a lot more this time, visiting all the floors in the building. The owner had bought an entire tall-house and converted into a bar, where the theme was home décor. The first floor was made up to look like a kitchen, the second floor was done up like a living room, the third floor looked like a bedroom and bathroom (complete with tiles and seats made out of toilets) and the fourth floor was the real apartment, where the owner lived. It was a pretty cute idea, I must say, although his decorating style was a bit IKEA-heavy for a stylish bar.
After hanging out with the owner and his friends until about 1h00, we finally made our way over to the main festival event, again at the Tri Postal:
N.A.M.E. Festival 2008, Lille (Day 2)
(Check out this picture! I took this from the view from Fantômette's hotel room, just across the street from the Tri Postal.)
We again stopped by Fantô's apartment-hotel to drop off our things, and then headed across the street and into the bar. Unlike last night, we had arrived at high-tide, so getting through the coat check and getting our first drinks were a bit of a hassle. Nonetheless we eventually took care of that and got on the dancefloor.
We got in just in time to hear the last part of their set, which was predictably rock-electro fusion. It wasn’t really anybody’s cup of tea, so we headed over into the next room after a few minutes.
This guy’s set was mostly pretty hard techno, making use of some minimalism in the sense of slowly-changing structures, but otherwise using a texture and aesthetic that was more “hard” techno. It was good enough to dance to, certainly, but I’ll admit that I was mostly just waiting for the next set to start.
We noticed that, unlike last night, the bouncers weren’t hassling people very much for smoking pot or taking drugs. The night before, bouncers were constantly walking through the smoking area, sniffing the air for the scent of cannabis. If you got caught doing anything of that sort, the bouncers kicked you out permanently, without any “final warning” or anything like that. This time, they seemed to be a lot more relaxed about it.
Also, while the crowd was still pretty young and pretty intense about their partying, there wasn’t quite the same Dionysian extremes of intoxication and drink-spilling that there was the night before. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t get a drink or two spilled on me, just that it wasn’t as much and I wasn’t elbowed in the ribs nearly as often.
Oh, and here's a quick clip from his set, although I am again totally embarrassed by the audio compression on this !@#$ camera. It takes much better low-light pictures, but this audio crap is bull!@#$.
I recall seeing Radio Slave at mutek as well and being pretty disappointed with his sound, so I wasn’t expecting too much from this set. Although it was still as bombastic and loud as I remembered back in June, his track selection and his mixing style managed to make it work. It felt like the tempo was a bit slower than in his previous set at mutek, and his transitions were smoother.
Ambivalent’s set was really quite nice, although Fantômette complained that it was a bit “too cold,” which I think I can understand. There was no trace of the sort of “funky” house influences that one usually finds in contemporary minimal. The style was very much minimal-with-heavy-beats, but there wasn’t much swing or groove to the sounds. I still liked it quite a bit, especially since he seemed to be very good at creating well-paced ups and downs in the set, which is difficult to do well in a live set (i.e., just working with loops rather than completed tracks).
Gaiser’s set was perhaps a little bit too heavy for my tastes, but was still really well done. I only saw about 30 mins of his set, though, before I headed into the other room and discovered that Danton Eeprom was playing.
I remember seeing Danton Eeprom back at Mutek this June and being really blown away by his live set. It was pretty epic and large-scale, while remaining well within a certain kind of elaborately minimal sound. He created smooth alternations between heavy and light textures, giving the set a greater feeling of unity and direction. It was probably the best set of the night, and according to Fantô, it was also the best of the whole festival, both weekends.
If the SIS track, “Standing / Nesrib” was the tune of the night yesterday, Dubfire’s remix of Audio Slave’s “Grindhouse Tool” was the one tonight, being played twice by other DJs in addition to Radio Slave himself dropping it.
At some point during this set, an adorable girl with a super-cute haircut was dancing next to me, clearly drunk/high and beaming with pleasure. There was a guy making his way through the crowd, pinching girl’s butts and trying to come on to them clumsily, which all of them rebuffed pretty pointedly. When he got to her, he wouldn’t leave her alone and she was a bit too tore up to put up substantial resistance, so I inserted myself between them and made it look like we were together. This had the desired effect (he left), but then she spent the rest of the night trying to make intense eye contact with me. As I’ve mentioned before, this sort of eye contact, especially when initiated by a girl, means “What’s keeping you? Jump on me, dammit.” She never actually tried to talk to me or anything, so I didn’t have to break the news to her that I liked boys.
I have only vague memories of seeing this guy play at Club der Visionäre in Berlin, and I vaguely recall liking it a lot. This context was a bit different from the low-intensity biergarten atmosphere of that club in Berlin, so his set was a lot harder and more intense at this event. Nonetheless, it was probably my favorite set of the evening, with an emphasis on melodic, rhythmically complex and bouncing basslines and reverbed, “smeared” samples above it. I’m usually not a big fan of those tracks that make heavy use of reverb and panning to create a sort of blurry echo chamber effect; I find it usually defuses the music’s drive and sort of takes it out of focus. But this set was really well done and really effective. I was dancing like a mad fool right up until the end of his set, shortly after 6h00.
[Again, OMG I'm so sorry that the audio is so awful on this thing.]
APM001
When the second room had closed, they left the first room open for a bit longer. This DJ was apparently connected with the organization putting this festival together, and his set was pretty straight-ahead techno. Well done, if a bit too heavy-handed for my liking. What was interesting was, as his next-to-last track, he put down some white label or recent release that involves Barack Obama’s 2004 DNC speech layered over a techno track, which seemed to be a direct homage of earlier House tracks that quote Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Apparently, the parallels between these two people has not been lost on Europeans, either. During that track, the video artists switched to a new set of videos, which showed Obama speaking at the 2008 DNC Convention in slow motion, while cycling through various Obama campaign posters, as well as a “Vote Obama” insignia. It was night and I appreciated the political engagement, but I wondered what good it would do at a party that appeared to be 100% European.
When things finally tapered off, we headed outside and regrouped. Danton Eeprom was going to mix at the afterparty and some of us were really determined to go see him. I, however, was already pretty tired and I knew that I would have to get up before noon to check out of my hotel, so I begged off it and headed back to the hotel for some very brief slumber.
I managed to get myself relatively early, because I had to do laundry and I was braced for it to take all morning and afternoon. The apartment doesn’t have a washing machine (which is actually pretty common in Europe, where apartment buildings rarely have common laundry areas), so I had to lug my laundry downstairs and about 20 metres up the street to the nearest Laundromat. The upside, however, was that doing your laundry in a Laundromat is freakin fast. You’ve got a whole row of washing machines, most of them unoccupied at 10am on a Friday morning, so you can just toss every load of laundry into the machines all at once, and then toss them all into one of the high-performance massive drum-barrel dryers for 20 minutes and your done. I did three loads in about 1.5 hours, including folding afterwards.
Anyway, I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon doing a few chores and replying to some emails, and then I packed my bags and headed over to Gare du Nord. I ran into Fantômette’s girlfriend on the train platform, so we chatted a bit before getting into our respective traincars. The ride was short and pleasant, maybe an hour or so by TGV; I managed to get a bit more work done on my proposal revisions, which made me feel better about spending a weekend partying / researching.
Once in Lille, we each went to our respective hotels and dropped off our stuff. I then went over to Fantômette’s hotel and met the rest of the crew (mostly the Frenchy Krew from my Berlin summer), and we hung out and relaxed for a while. Eventually, we headed over to a little café in the old town, where a “before” party was going on; apparently, we had some stuff to drop off with the person running it.
We were all pretty damn hungry, so we found a pizzeria in the area and got some food, and then headed back to the hotel to meet some more of the crew who had arrived later. By approximately midnight, we were getting ready to head to the location of the music festival (which was just across the street from Fantômette’s hotel!). We usually wouldn’t go anywhere this early in the night, but Fantô had been here last weekend for the first part of the festival and she said that the location got packed really quickly and it soon became difficult to check your coat and get some drinks.
N.A.M.E. Festival 2008, Lille (Day 1)
The N.A.M.E. festival takes place over two weekends in Lille, France, during September every year. The festival has been around for 4 years now, and its links with city and regional government has allowed it to expand into a city-wide festival. Although the main events are certainly the 4 club soirées that take place over the two weekends, there are also workshops, seminars, concerts and exhibitions (go to the website and look at the event calendar, “Programmation,” to see their offerings). In this way, it’s actually pretty similar to Montréal’s mutek, although not yet as well-developed and far less interested in experimental music.
Anyway, one important way in which this festival is really similar to mutek is the importance placed on video and VJs for Electronic Dance Music performances. The festival has access to an event space called the Tri Postal, which is actually the city’s old mail sorting depot. They have divided the long rectangular open space of the main floor into two large rooms and mounted projection screens around probably 40% of the room (behind the DJ and along one wall). Then they had a different video artist do a set in parallel with each DJ set, which also meant that you didn’t just have one poor VJ doing all the same video for 6 hours. So you’ll notice that I’ve included a lot of pictures that I might usually throw out—blurry, underexposed, grainy—because the images on the video screens were worth keeping.
The party scene in Lille (and, according to the people I talked to, most of the North of France) is very young, exuberant to the point of approaching a mosh-pit, and very heavy drinkers/drug-takers. As a result, I got stepped on a lot, I took quite a few elbows to the ribs, I had at least two full drinks spilled on me (ugh, the stench of Red Bull), and droplets from more distant drink-related accidents all through the night. Anyway, here’s a blurry and oddly-exposed picture that probably best captures the kinetic, sweaty and chaotic aspects of the evening:
This set was rather slow and atmospheric, with very little that would motivate you to dance or throw up your hands. It was an OK warm-up set, perhaps, but it would’ve been better suited to a chill-out room or something. I managed to get some video of it, so you’ll see what I mean:
Anyway, we had arrived near the end of the set, so we just stood around and took care of our drinks until the next act started. In the meanwhile, though, I managed to get a few good pictures of the video screens.
Chloé’s live set was much more interesting than the previous one, but again it felt not very appropriate for a dancefloor. I think I would’ve loved her live set in a car, driving on the highway, or in my apartment, relaxing after a night of partying. The set started out as very abstract and atmospheric—which is not out of the ordinary for live sets—making use of echo effects on individual samples to create a sense of space. The various sounds eventually gained some sort of regularity and began to approximate a danceable beat, albeit a very slow one, but by then it was nearly 30 minutes into her set. In other words, she was halfway through her set and it didn’t feel like it had really started yet. This reminded me a lot of Chloé’s set at mutek last June, which was all downtempo and deep/dub, with her occasionally murmuring through a microphone. Again, I think the sound of it was pretty high quality, but it just didn’t work in the context provided. I’ve got a couple of clips from the set, which should give you an idea of what I’m talking about:
After about half an hour, I gave up on Chloé and headed over to the other room to hear Sebo K. His set was very solidly in what gets called “minimal” in Europe: minimal in the sense of slow-changing structures and sparse upper-range textures, but maximal in the sense of volume and intensity. I was thrilled to hear him spin that SIS track I have been talking about, but aside from that none of the tracks he put down really wowed me. The affective level of the whole set felt rather flat; there were no departures and returns, no shifts in texture and intensity that give shape to an overall set. Instead, the set was at a constant medium-high intensity, as if he was just showing us a bunch of tracks that he likes. Nonetheless, I did enjoy it and I got quite a bit of dancing in.
Tiefschwarz’s set was, as the French might say, très efficace. It got the crowd going and he showed great agility in mixing tracks in ways that maintained an exciting push-and-pull on the dancefloor, but I found his overall sound a bit loud and blunt. It was like he was taking minimal techno themes and setting them to bombastic “progressive house” tracks (see Paul Oakenfold). Also, he would occasionally decide to pay homage to “classic” house with vocal tracks and “funky” elements, but they generally fell very flat for me. I realize that this same tactic seemed to work really well in Berlin, but I think there was something with the choice of these “classic”-sounding tracks and the context that just made it fail for me. It was still a good set and I definitely had fun dancing to it, but the slick mixing techniques were marred by a heavy hand on the bass levels.
I decided to take a break for a while from Tiefschwarz and watch Marcin Czubala do his live set. I had seen him perform live at the Mobilee Summer Soirée about two months ago and had really liked it, so I was looking forward to hearing what he would do here. The set was pretty similar with what he had done at the previous party, but this time he seemed less interested in maintaining a consistently danceable groove, and more interested in inserting low-intensity moments in the set where he explored reverb and distortion effects in more abstract ways. The effect wasn’t unpleasant, but I often found myself waiting for him to return to a groove that actually hung together.
Aside from my inexplicable crush on the pair (especially Phage), I’ve been impressed by how these two mixed together when I was in Berlin. Their sets always seem to retain the finesse and subtlety of well-wrought techno while still making deft use of melodic basslines and well-times buildups to keep the crowd motivated and vibrating at a high frequency (so to speak). This set was no different, although maybe they were a bit more heavy-handed with the bass. I really enjoyed their set, and especially their attention to the sort of crackling, mid- and high-frequency rhythmic patterns that I really enjoy, but Anja Schneider was playing in the other room at the same time, so I had to move about halfway through their set.
I had also seen Anja Schneider at the Mobilee party in Berlin and had been really impressed with how her DJing skills have improved over time. Tonight’s set was probably one of the best sets I’ve heard from her and certainly my favorite of the night. She managed to shuttle between really intense, “maximal” minimal and the more delicate and subtle versions of minimal techno/house, which also gave a great overall rhythm of ups and downs to her set. Her set was at no point boring, and her selection was (mostly) excellent. He mixing skills were pretty flawless; I didn’t notice her mess up or make a rough transition, and more often I was noticing her ingenious techniques for transforming tracks into new works through the manipulation of effects and EQ levels.
At the end of the night, the bouncers immediately started shuffling us from one room to the next, past the coat check and through the doors. We eventually made it back to the hotel of Fantô and the Frenchy Krew, where we hung out for an hour or so before finally going our separate ways and getting some sleep. There was apparently an after-party going on somewhere in town, but nobody was really feeling up to it.
I had a surprisingly busy day at work today. When I wondered aloud why everyone suddenly needed to get temporary accounts and online course websites NOW, I was reminded that the full batch of autumn-quarter students were to land tomorrow. Ah, I see. Good thing I’m leaving for Lille on Friday.
I made a half-hearted attempt at grocery shopping on the way home, stopping at the Monoprix near my work. I’m going away for the weekend anyway, and I’d rather make use of the farmer’s markets that are in my neighborhood, but I needed something to eat tonight, as well as some of basic staples. When I get back next week, one of my goals is to discover the markets in my neighborhood. Actually, I still haven’t gone for a good exploratory walk of my area…
I found some really lovely oyster mushrooms at Monoprix, so I decided I would do a simple poelée (a French version of a pan-fry: on lower heat, with butter, and usually finished with parsley and garlic), and then a sort of ratatouille-style vegetable ragout. I discovered that the burners on my gas stove burn REALLY hot, even on the lowest setting, so I found that the onions were browning and almost burning by the time I had prepared the other vegetables. It seems like I’ll need to peel and chop everything before I actually start cooking. Anyway, dinner was still pretty tasty (especially those mushrooms!), and I managed to eat far too much bread. I think I’m no longer allowed to bring bread home with me. Or, rather, I need to make peace with the fact that French bread won’t last the night in my place, so I need to buy it much less often. None of this le pain quotidien for my fat ass, thank you.
Aside from finally catching up on my blogging, I got very little else done today, because I turned on CNN International and was transfixed by the intricate political drama of McCain becoming all hysterical and suspending his campaign to “help” on the Wall Street bailout bill, despite the fact that he sits on none of the financial committees, and the chairs of those committees (especially the sharp-tongued sister, Barney Frank) explicitly said that his presence would only complicate matters. McCain also said that he wanted to cancel or postpone the debate coming up on Friday, so that he could “concentrate” on being the Savior of the Financial Crisis, rather than The Guy Who Thought the Economy’s Fundamentals Were Strong a Week Ago. Or The Guy Who’s Campaign Manager Turns Out To Serve On The Board For Fanny Mae. Or The Guy Currently Being Eclipsed By His Running Mate, “Churchy Spice.”
Anyway, Obama actually had the brass balls to say, “The debate is still on, asshole. With or without you.” Apparently, the plan now is that they’ll shift to a Town Hall format or an interview with Jim Lehrer if McCain doesn’t show. Some people suggested that he send his VP running mate, Sarah Palin to substitute for him, but anybody who has seen her give an interview would understand why that’s a horrible idea for McCain. Oh, and by coincidence the postponement of this Friday’s debate might require cancelling the only Vice Presidential debate…conveniently freeing Palin from ever having to come face-to-face with Joe Biden. That would really disappointment, as I had already bought popcorn in anticipation for that circus event.
Anyway, since the all-important Meeting With The Lame-Duck President was taking place while it was night over here, I had CNN on with endless talking-head coverage, and meanwhile I spent hours reading the comment threads on MetaFilter about the same thing. As you can imagine, people had a LOT to say online about this turn of events. From the sounds of things after the meeting, there had been a plan already worked out by the House and Senate on both sides BEFORE McCain showed up, and then at the meeting where McCain and Obama were present, the House Republicans suddenly decided that they had a whole new set of demands which pretty much torpedoed the meeting. Since the House Republican representative had been in a private meeting with McCain just beforehand, the speculation by critics is that the House Republicans deliberately forced the larger meeting to fail to create an opening for McCain to look like the saving hero, since the plan on the table had been agreed to well before he landed in Washington. Either way, it made for some amusing political drama. And it would be more amusing if the American and global economies weren’t at risk. And I don’t even want to imagine how the Canadian economy will do if the US collapses. Ugh.
So, after an late-night episode of As The Presidential Candidates Turn, I hit the sack.
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