Shopping!!

After a long and pretty frustrating day at work, the plan for tonight was SHOPPING. It’s January, and in France that means les soldes (“sale season!”). According to French law, stores are only allowed to mark down items in their stores twice a years for about 5 weeks (plus, starting this year, one extra “surprise” week of the store’s choosing). These seasons are normally the month of January into early February, and the month of July (I might be wrong about the precise timing of the summer one).

Anyway, the mark-downs tend to be drastic, since the stores have a few weeks to clear their stores of all of the stock from the previous season. Once les soldes are over, leftover stock is liquidated.

So off I went with two other UofC grad students to the big famous department stores, including Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. I scored really well in Printemps, picking up a pair of pink and olive Tiger Onitsuka runners for 40€ and a Mexx sweater for 41€. Lafayette was less exciting. While the boys in the group were waiting for the girls in the group to finish making purchases at Lafayette, we decided to head down the street to Zara to see what they had. The place was a war zone; there were piles of mismatched shoes and clothes on various tables, in complete disarray, and with half of the merchandise on the floor and currently being trampled. The cash registers looked like they were selling the last tickets off the island before a hurricane. We quickly found ourselves totally disinterested in shopping there, and so headed over to the Benetton store a couple of doors down. That was just boring and not very well priced, but thankfully by then the girls had finished in Lafayette and we were ready for some food and drinks.

We ended up going to a restaurant on rue Caumartin called “Le Clos Bourguignon.” On the way down, we noticed that a chunk of rue Caumartin had a bunch of Christmas lights strung across the street that involved red maple leaves. Upon closer inspection, one set of lights spelled out the phrase “A Canadian Christmas” in French. None of us had any earthly idea what that was about.

Anyway, we sat down to eat at about 19h00, so we were really early for the food service. Nonetheless, the waitress was rather displeased when only two of the four of us ordered food with the wine. There was practically nobody else in the dining room, but she nonetheless gave us a scornful look and then had her grandmotherly co-worker serve us for the rest of the meal.

From there, we headed over to the Marais for some drinks, although one of our party wussed out and headed home before we got there. One of our group was visiting from Montréal and really wanted to check out the lesbian scene here, but my knowledge of it was pretty spotty, seeing as most of my contact with lesbian gals in Paris is through the techno scene. I remembered that there was a bar called Nyx on the rue Roi de Sicile that opened a couple of years ago and was supposed to be a dyke bar, so we walked over there.

Not so in the bar, however. When we got in, there was a bartender, a hostess, an a few of her friends, all of whom nearly pounced on us when we stepped in. None of the small group looked at all connected to the dyke scene, so we quickly surmised that this was no longer a girlie bar. Nonetheless, a certain recent mother in our group needed a quiet place to pump out her breastmilk, so we grabbed drinks while she ran downstairs and took advantage of the very empty bathroom.

We were actually planning on hanging out for an hour or two until the place filled with people, but the heating was really insufficient in the building, and we found ourselves totally freezing. So we finished our drinks and headed over to a café on the corner of roi de Sicile and rue vieille du temple (I can’t remember the name) and settled in for a couple of bottles of wine. The café turned out to be dyke central, so we guzzled our wine happily while the lesbian member of our group ogled the girls. Good times.

Meh

After a resoundingly “meh” night out, I allowed myself again to sleep in Berlin-style (a.k.a., past noon) and then hauled myself out of bed. I had plans for doing laundry, which quickly evaporated under the intensity of my non-motivation. On the other hand, my lack of internet access was enough to force me into the shower and off into the city to find some solution. Priorities, eh?

The annoying thing is that my neighbors can get a free WiFi network called Ozone Paris if they put their laptops near a window, but I can’t. My laptop can detect it, but can’t do much about connecting to it. Alas, this has been one of the downsides of buying the a Mac in 2004, when the Powerbooks were all the Aluminum model. As shiny and durable and sleek as they looked, the aluminum casing acts as an ideal barrier for radio waves, i.e., the sort of waves you need for WiFi. My reception is nonetheless usually fine in most places, but wen a network signal is weak, I often have problems were people with other models don’t.

On the way out of my neighborhood, I stopped at a döner shop on rue St. Denis. The man at the counter was speaking Turkish, so I held some hope that I would finally get a döner that approximated the quality of what I found in Berlin. I greeted him in Turkish and put in my order (mostly) in Turkish, but the result was as underwhelming as my previous attempts: dry meat, wilted vegetables (with no shredded cabbage or cucumbers), and covered with soggy fries. Next time I order a döner in Paris, I need to explicitly say that I don’t want fries, because they’re always terrible and—quite frankly—a döner is a sufficient meal on it’s own. I don’t need another ½-pound of fried potatoes, thank you. Well, at least this doner was made from what appeared to be lamb.

Anyway, I headed off to rue Montgallet, the 200m-long street of Chinese-run computer shops that seem to exist in every large city. Thank goodness that most Chinese merchants don’t give a damn about observing Sunday as a day of rest. My plan was to get a range-extender of some sort for my laptop. Either an external antenna or a USB-key Wifi adapter that would have a better range. About half of the stores I visited didn’t sell the sorts of devices I was looking for, and the rest had stuff that was only compatible with PCs. After one merchant finally told me, “Look, with Macs, third-party WiFi is complicated,” I decided to call it a day and try again Monday morning at FNAC where they were more likely to have what I need.

I headed back over to the gardens above Les Halles to make use of the public internet. More so than last time, I had real trouble getting connected, but eventually I got my internet fix. I started the online application process for the Vélib bike rental program, but hit a barrier. The concept of online commerce hasn’t quite taken hold yet the way it has in North America, so often “online” transactions still require snail-mail or in-person steps to complete. A horrible, awful, evil example of this is the CampusFrance online application system for French student visas, which doesn’t do a good job of warning you that you need to send a money order to the French Embassy in Washington DC by mail, which will take two weeks from arrival to be processed, which will then allow you to make an appointment in the coming months at your consulate to get your visa. Before the advent of this system, you just made an appointment at the consulate and paid with a credit card (which you still do; you now pay once for the online system and again for the in-person appointment).

But I digress; the end of this story is that the Vélib “online” registration is really just a “pre-registration,” which means that I now need to print out an automatically-generated PDF document, photocopy various pieces of identity, include a relevé d’identité bancaire, and a personal check made out to them. Then, you wait for your member’s card to arrive in the mail. So, in other words, using Vélib is almost impossible for a tourist, especially one that doesn’t have a French bank account. Anyway, I’ll send out the application when my checks arrive at the bank, and we’ll see how long it takes for me to have actual use of the Vélib system.

After all of that, I sauntered home, made a bit of something to eat, and went to bed.

The Endless WiFi Search and First Night of Partying

After a somewhat hefty night of celebration, I decided to let myself sleep in “Berlin-style,” which means until noon (from now on, anytime you wake up at noon or later, you’re doin’ it Berlin-style). Then, I got out of bed and got to work.

You see (and you probably noticed if you check this blog regularly or have an RSS feed), I hadn’t blogged anything past last Saturday during this week, mostly thanks to the frantic schedule I was keeping. Today, with the afternoon entirely open and a rather busy week coming down the pipe, I decided now was the time to get caught up. Since I cant seem to catch the WiFi network that my neighbors have been using (I plan to get an external WiFi adapter sometime soon to fix that), this actually worked out pretty well. Without the internet to amuse and distract me, I managed to get about 6 days’ worth of blogging done in 5 hours, which is pretty good.

After that, I needed to post this shit on the web. Well, Paris has free WiFi in most of its parks, so off I went to Les Halles, which isn’t too far from where I’m living right now. I wandered around until I saw a sign with the familiar purple-ish shapes that indicate a free WiFi spot. I set myself down and opened up my laptop…and nothing. I took a closer look at the sign and saw a map with a layout of the gardens, showing two transmitters with circular transmission ranges. One was located at the Berger gate, which is close to where I am, so I headed over there and opened my laptop. Nothing. I moved to a bench nearby…my computer detected the network but couldn’t get on. I moved across the pathway to another bench…nothing. I walked directly over to where the Berger gate was and sat nearly underneath it…nothing.

Losing patience, I found another sign with the broadcast zones and looked for the other transmitter. It was located on the other side of the park, near the Louis Aragon walkway. I tried to get a good idea of precisely where the center of that circle was, and then headed over and sat my self on a pair of benches that should’ve been directly above or beside the WiFi radio. From there, I was FINALLY able to get logged on.

Then, the login script for the free WiFi kept on throwing errors that pissed off Firefox and made it constantly disconnect. I opened up Safari and it worked fine. Yes, for once Safari was more robust than Firefox. Go figure.

Anyway, I was FINALLY connected to the net, and so I set about posting all of the last 6 days of blog posts in a row. So now you can read about my frantic search for an apartment! It’s a thrilling read, I tell ya. There was also an explosion of email waiting for me, so I took care of responding to most of it, and made a note to myself to come back here tomorrow afternoon and finish some of this business.

I thought about just walking down to the huge FNAC in the Les Halles shopping mall, but it was already 20h00 and I was pretty sure the shops closed around then. I headed down into the mall and, indeed, it was all closed. To my surprise, though, the multiplex cinema and all the little coffee joints around it were really hopping. And even though the stores had just closed, there were still a lot of people wandering around the halls of the mall. This is a radical change from a decade ago when I came here as an exchange student, and even a change from when I was here two years ago. Ever since the city demolished the old, traditional covered market and created this underground shopping mall, this place has been a wasteland of closed storefronts and late-night muggings (made possible by the fact that the mall has to stay open late for access to the métro-RER station beneath it). Also, thanks to the fact that three of the 5 RER lines pass through the Les Halles station, this mall has been a favorite hang-out of young banlieusards (“suburbanites,” although the connotation is more “ghetto trash” than “wealthy middle-class”). Anyway, the banlieusards are still there, but there were generally more people milling about and there was a greater mix of people in the crowds. I don’t know what the place looks like at 2am on a Tuesday, but this is still an improvement.

So, upon finding FNAC closed, I headed down into the bowels of the métro station and caught the 11 line (my old, dirty, overheated line!) to Belleville, where I got a filling yet healthy bowl of Pho at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Tin Tin. I put so many hot peppers into my soup, I was sniffling like a coke addict by the time I paid my bill. From there, it was back home to rest up a bit in preparation for a night out. Apparently, Fantômette was going to some sort of event at the Trabendo, and I had no earthly idea where that was, but thank goodness that my friends are only an SMS-message away.

The Three-Step Plan

1: Le Pinup [LINK]

Around midnight, I got a message from Fantômette, saying that she was meeting some folks at Le Pinup before continuing on with their night. Well, since that bar is only 15 minutes’ walk from where I am right now, I decided to head out.

On the way over, I discovered that rue Saint-Denis is the major stroll for the city’s prostitutes. You can’t walk 5 meters without passing a woman with a face older than her body, and a body underdressed for the cold weather. What was odder was that there were lots of men standing on street corners or in doorways, looking bored yet available. I would’ve presumed that they were hustlers, except that they were…um…not in possession of the typical sex-trade body type. In other words, these were mostly middle-aged dumpy guys dressed in unexceptional clothing—in other words, more likely johns than hustlers. So it was odd that they were standing around looking as if they were waiting while the hookers were also standing around looking as if they were waiting. They could’ve been pimps, I suppose, but they DEFINITELY didn’t look like pimps. Usually, pimps do a good job of maintaining a personal appearance that demarcates them clearly from potential clients.

Anyway, I finally made it to Le Pinup and caught up with Fantô, her girlfriend and a cluster of her friends and buddies. Unlike when we were in Berlin, Fantômette here was in her “networking” mode, playing the role of DJ and promoter. Although I know that that sort of activity can be exhausting at times, I certainly benefited from it by being introduced to pretty much everybody that passed within 2 meters of her. Yay! Luis makes new friends.

We had some drinks, including a house special drink involving white wine, vodka and violet syrup called the “Purple Pinup.” The tiny bar was packed, even with almost 50% of the attendees standing outside smoking. We pushed our way downstairs to the converted cellar (recently renovated with new flooring that has taken away the mossy stench I experienced last time I had been here) to check out the DJ that was spinning. I have no earthly idea who this guy was, but he was sorta OK. He mixed together a somewhat noisier, more electro-influenced version of minimal house, which was sometimes pleasant and sometimes annoyingly ear-piercing, but never fantastic nor horrible.

By around 0h30 or so, we decided to move over to another bar in the Marais, called Yono, to see a friend and his partner spin. After taking ages to say goodbye to everyone (again, Fantômette in networking mode), we finally made our way by foot over to the Marais.

2: Yono

We eventually made it over to Yono and Fantômette immediately saw a group of girls that she knew. As it turns out, some of them had been out the night before at On Cherche Encore, so I got to be “social” too and chat with the lovely ladies. We eventually went inside, got some drinks from the super-friendly head bartender (who, of course, knew Fantô and greeted her with a big kiss and a hug) and went downstairs to say hi to the DJ duo, Bfck.

They were spinning a thoroughly electro set, with lots of “classic” tracks from the electro-clash wave of the early 2000s. Although it’s no longer a style that I particularly follow or enjoy, the set gave me a warm glow of nostalgia for my years in Toronto, when electroclash was the hottest thing since anything.

It was getting close to 2h00, and if we wanted to get all the way to Trabendo (which was in the Parc de la Villette near Porte de Pantin), we would need to catch the last métro or pay a LOT of money for a taxi. So we started making our way out of the bar and found ourselves in front of the entryway, talking to the same girls we had seen on the way in. We chatted some more and some more, while Fantômette’s girlfriend and I tried our best to humor a profoundly drunk guy who insisted that he lived in the apartment above the bar.

Finally, we got moving. It was already past 2h00 and there was no chance of catching the métro, but the girls we had been chatting with were also heading to the Trabendo and one of them had a car. So we headed over to where her car was parked and piled in. There was about one too many people in the car, which meant we were at risk of being stopped and getting a nice big fine for piling up like that.

In response to these concerns, one of the girls in the car said cheerily, “It’s OK! We’re all invisible, anyway. Isn’t that right, girls?” This joke only made sense because all of the women I was traveling with were queer. An ongoing complaint in both the politics and history of queer women is that they are treated as if invisible. Alas, I doubt a police officer would get the joke…you’re only invisible until you’re inconvenient, eh?

We drove over to the apartment of the woman who was driving (her apartment was close to the Trabendo), parked her car and sat in her apartment for a while and had a drink. At some point, someone checked their watch and pointed out that it was already 3h30. Considering that clubs in Paris close at 6h00 precisely, we only had 2.5 hours left for fun. So off we went to Trabendo. We decided to go by foot, which we later came to regret, as it was a lot further away than we had thought.

3: Trabendo

We got to Trabendo just before 4h00, after a seemingly endless walk. They were still charging full price for admission, so we grudgingly handed over 12€ for less than half of the night’s entertainment. As we were standing in the vestibule, one of the girls in our group leaned over to me and said, “This doesn’t sound like minimal techno, here.” Indeed, the sound coming out of the main room seemed more like a pounding progressive or trance set. Hmm.

Once we got inside, I immediately saw the playlist and pointed it out to the girls. Apparently, the headliner Philip Kieran had been on since 3h00 and would continue to 5h00. Really? This? We had all been under the impression that Philip Kieran produced some pretty fine minimal techno, but this was like an unholy alliance of Justice-style “neo rave” and crap Hi-NRG Euro-Techno progressive house. Maybe our reactions were more severe because of our high hopes going in, but I really found this horrid.

So I found myself doing something I’ve almost never done during a night out: stand against a railing outside of the dancefloor and exchange looks and gestures of disgust with other disappointed attendees. I was completely, utterly uninspired to throw myself into the crowd and dance, such was disappointment with the music. No doubt, part of our sour mood was the fact that we had just paid 12€ and walked halfway across Paris for this.

Anyway, by about 4h30 or so we realized that this was just not worth the aesthetic agony and we decided to move. Half of our crew decided to roll over to Le Rex to catch Jennifer Cardini, while the rest of us made our way home (including me). We caught a night bus from Porte de Pantin to Gare de l’Est, and from there I walked home and those heading to Le Rex hailed a taxi.

Overall, the night was sort of a cruel contrast to my previous weekend in Berlin. Of course, I know that there are great nights to be had in Paris and there is some great music to be found, but tonight was not it. I had a good time hanging out with Fantô and her friends and getting to know new people, but the musical side of the night was unexceptional at best, horrifying at worst. And, also, the fact that the night ended at 5h00, when things would just be getting into swing in Berlin, was not lost on anyone. Ah well, next Friday there’ll be an evening organized by Fantômette, called Happy People Only, so I’ve got something to look forward to.

mutek_2008 : Prologue

Well, I haven't posted to this blog since February (for reasons soon to be enumerated), and...well...a lot of shit has gone down since then. Here's the quick and dirty update:

• A colleague had something of a breakdown / crisis, and I found myself teaching two classes in the Winter and Spring quarters, rather than one; and this additional class was one of those lecture-hall, 50-minute-lecture-with-powerpoint sort of classes.
• I got Bell's Palsy, which is this bizarre and apparently spontaneous (although stress-related) paralysis of one or both facial nerves. Essentially, the left side of my face has been paralyzed since about April 19, and it'll take about 6 months to heal (if it heals completely).
• I gave my first paper at IASPM (Int'l Assoc. for the Study of Popular Music) and chaired a panel. This was also my first time attending the conference, so it's somewhat ironic/tragic that the aforementioned Bell's Palsy descended upon me 4 days before the conference. I sent the entire weekend strung out on powerful steroids (as an anti-inflammatory medication), with a droopy face, slobbering out of one side of my mouth like a young Jean Chrétien. I was really sexy.
• My brother got married just last weekend, which just happens to coincide with the last few weeks of classes (i.e., we're marking papers, preparing exams) and DEMF (the Detroit Electronic Music Festival). I really wanted to go to DEMF this year, since I missed last year while living in Paris, but weddings of immediate family come first (of course; my mom would kill me). Also, I was the best man, so it's not like attendance was ever optional. Anyway, it was fun and I returned back to Chicago exhausted, only to try to recover over 48 hours, teach some classes, and then head off to Montréal!
• I'll be heading back to Paris next year, so Luis in Paris will be truly Luis in Paris again soon! Of course, I still need to find a place to live, which has been about as difficult and expensive as I had expected.
• Mostly thanks to the sense of guilt that my suddenly-doubled teaching load engendered among the faculty, I got a grant to spend the summer in Berlin, doing research. I had a terrifying few weeks when I didn't know where I would be staying, but I finally nailed down a room in Berlin (sharing the apartment, alas, but tolerable for 2 months). Viel Spaß!
• I'm looking for someone to sublet my apartment for the duration of July 2008 - June 2009, while in Berlin and Paris. This has me totally terrified, as I have less than two months to go and I've got nobody to cover the place. I wonder what stress-related illness I'll develop worrying about that?

OK, got all of that? Our story now picks up after the return from the fraternal wedding in London, Ontario, and a 48-hour turn-around in Chicago.

After doing some research on which compact digital cameras had the best sensitivity in low-light situations (i.e., 90% of the photography I do), I discovered that Fujifilm cameras are widely recognized as the best. I did a bit more research and came across the Fujifilm Finepix F100fd, which has the best signal-to-noise ratio for high ISO settings (in other words, you can turn up the light sensitivity really high without getting lots of visual static, which allows you to take non-flash photos in low lighting). I set about trying to find a place in Chicago that had it, but none of them had it in stock. Sure, you could order the camera and maybe get it in few weeks, but nothing immediately available. i really wanted to take the camera with me to Montréal to give the camera a sort of "test-drive;" the camera was pretty expensive, so if I was going to spend almost 2x what I had on my first digital camera (Panasonic LZ-5), I wanted to make sure that it was worth it. I found this place in downtown Chicago, Central Camera,, and the man who answered the phone said that they always carried the F100 in stock. Great! That was Tuesday evening, so I made plans to get up painfully early Wednesday morning (today) to visit their store upon opening (8:30am), so that I could make it to my morning class at 9:30am. So, I drag myself out of bed at some ungodly hour, toss my luggage in the car, and head off to the store, only to find a different person at the counter who said that they had the S100, the Z100, but never the F100. Well thanks, assholes, I just rearranged my day to drop nearly $400 in your store without you needing to convince me of anything, and you can't even keep track of your inventory. This is what I thought in my head, as I stomped out of the store and continued on with my day. Grrr.

Mercifully, one of my TAs was teaching my morning lecture today, so I only had to worry about my Intro to World Music class. We were reading a chapter from Joe Scholss’s book, Making Beats (the chapter on live instrumentation and aesthetics) and his 2006 article in Ethnomusicology on the b-boy musical canon. There was actually a lot of interesting stuff to get out of the two articles on canons, but I was a bit disappointed in the relative silence of the class today. I’ve often called on students to re-articulate what they’ve posted to the class’ discussion board before class—just to get discussion started—but I hadn’t had time to read the board today, so I had to just hope they would rise to the occasion. I managed to get a couple of them to summarize the basic argument of the essays, a skill which I have discovered that many of them need to develop; while some of my students arrive to class ready to discuss out of / away from the article, many haven’t grasped the arguments of the article itself and need some review. Anyway, with that review out of the way, the students were pretty taciturn today, which left me lecturing more than I usually like. Nonetheless, there were some important points to be made about canons and cultural capital and so on, so I managed to fill the time as necessary. Nonetheless, I need to work on being more comfortable with silence; I know that a lot of students need time to gather their thoughts before speaking, since they’re too timid to just launch into and sustain a half-formed thought (which is what graduate-level discussion is all about).

OK, enough about pedagogy.

I wrapped up a few administrative things on campus and then started back toward my car, which was parked all the way up on Ingleside and 54th. On the way, I passed by Lauren and Peter’s place and heard someone yell “HEY HOTTIE!!” As it turns out, Lauren and Peter were home. After spending a bit of time hanging out with them and trying out their new WiiFit (awesome but also totally shaming) I headed off to my car. I was already packed and had my luggage in the trunk, so I just needed to grab some lunch, some last-minute purchases (ear plugs…important for EDM festivals!) and then head off to the airport.

Of course, it’s never that easy. I left Hyde Park around 2:45pm, and I had a flight at 7:35, which meant I should be there around 5:30. So I had almost 2.5 hours to get to O’Hare. All was going well until I hit the 90-94 north of the Loop, where things came to a screeching halt. It was stop-and-go traffic the rest of the way, and I didn’t get to the airport until almost 5pm. I tried something new this time: I parked at the “Park ‘n’ Ride” parking lot at Cumberland (2 blue-line stops away from the airport) and took the blue line from there. While I had been stuck in traffic, I kept thinking to myself, “If I had just taken the blue line, it would probably be faster than this.” This would be true, if the CTA trains ran with anything approximating efficiency. When I got on the blue line at Cumberland to ride the train for those last two stops, the trip took longer than it would have to keep driving those last few kilometers in traffic, find parking at the airport, and take the shuttle to the terminal. As the train pulled out of the station, a high-pitched buzzer would sound, then the train would slow to a near stop. Then it would slowly accelerate again. About 10 seconds later, just as it was about to hit normal operating speed, the buzzer would sound again and the train would nearly stop. Like this, over and over, for the entire trip between Cumberland and the airport. As much as I am usually a proponent of public transport, this little moment explained why I’ve gone to the trouble of owning a car in Chicago. This sort of bullshit was intolerable for two stations; I can’t imagine running the entire line from Hyde Park to O’Hare. Gah.

Checking in and taking my flight was totally unremarkable, except for the moment when I got up to look for some food and I left one of my carry-on bags. I realized it in about 60 seconds and headed back, only to be greeted by a cloud of Concerned Citizens worrying about what sort of terrorist would have left this piece of luggage. I reclaimed the bag sheepishly, trying to look as non-terrorist as possible (of course, I hadn’t shaved that day and I already look pretty Mediterranean/near-eastern).

I spent almost the entire flight playing Penny-Arcade’s (link) new game, On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness, which is pretty much a demonstration of all of the gaming conventions and absurdities that the authors of that online comic make fun of on a regular basis. Very funny, and surprisingly good gameplay.

Upon arriving in Montréal, I grabbed a taxi to my hotel. Apparently, there was some sort of “perfect storm” of construction and road maintenance in the downtown area, which made our route to the hotel dizzyingly circuitous. It was, apparently, maddening to my cab driver, who became more and more incensed and spouted increasingly obscene and inventive curses in Quebecois French. At one point, he nearly ran over a construction worker out of frustration. I tipped him heavily—partially out of respect for his dedication to getting me to my hotel at any (mortal) cost, but also partially out of fear.

There was the first night-time event of mutek (link) that night, but I just couldn’t do it. I got to my hotel around 11:40pm, my contact lenses were dried out, and I was dead tired. I decided that I would get up bright and early go collect my weekend pass the next morning.

With Love, from Nantes

So, I managed to collect my mother at the airport the next day, go down to Le Mans to meet our friends there, have lunch, and then head off to Nantes. Nantes has been great so far, but I won't be blogging for it because I'm on vacation, dammit.

On the other hand, Blogger now has a Draft option that allows you to test new features, and of course I'm totally on board. Currently, they have a new video-posting capacity that is in the testing stages, which I'm going to test out right here. Yay, new gadgets! I'm a total gearwhore, sometimes.

Hmm. On preview, I see that this video-posting thing is convenient, but loses some of the utility of YouTube posting. I can't tag the video sample with useful keywords, nor can I add metadata about the time and place of the recording. But I suppose those are features that can be added later....

Rex Trilogy III: Dinner, Urban Athletics, Sleeparchive and Onur Özur

I got home rather late Friday night, so I slept in pretty late and then crawled out of bed. I took to transferring the interview I had recorded the night before and doing a bit of organization, then did a whole lot of catch-up blogging. I had a pass that would get me into the Rex tonight before 1h00 (thanks, Fantô!), so I had plans for a leisurely and somewhat early dinner, a short disco nap, and then off to the party.

However, midway through the evening just as I was getting ready to fetch some groceries, I get a call from an old friend living in Paris. This was the same one that I hung out with only a few days after arriving in Paris last September, who had once stayed with me in Toronto back in the early 2000s. Anyway, she was having a get-together of all the girls that had been in the Ottawa (Canada) program with her back in the day, so she called me to invite to join them for dinner. I was thrilled to get another chance to see my friend before leaving, and I was curious to see what the rest of the girls were up to, so I accepted. The only problem was that we were supposed to meet to start cooking dinner at her place around 20h30.

So I quickly did my grocery run, frantically did as much blogging and correspondence as I could, and then dashed off to her place. As it turns out, she was running late, so by the time I got to her place, she was just getting back from the market. The rest of the group arrived shortly thereafter and we started cooking up dinner. Some of us chopped up chicken breasts into large chunks to pan fry with some herbs, while some of us chopped up onions and red peppers as a base for a tomato and wine sauce. In the meanwhile, we also set a large pot of basmati white rice to cook. The rice took the longest to prepare (the 1.5 litres of water were too much for my friend's little electric plates), but once it was ready we placed a base of rice on each plate, placed some of the chicken on top, and then covered it with sauce.

So dinner was great (mostly thanks to my host and her friends; they did a good job of keeping me out of the kitchen), but we had started late and the rice had taken much longer than we had anticipated. By the time we had finished the main course and had a small cheese course (with the stinkiest cheese I have ever smelled), it was already 0h15. I had 45 minutes to cross Paris, get in the guest line, and make my way through the door if I wanted to get in for free. After having messed up and missed the door last night, I was determined to get there on time. I skipped dessert and said my goodbyes, and bolted out the door and toward the subway stop (which is actually a rather far from her place).

Now, keep in mind that I had just finished a rather heavy rice dish. As you rice-eaters of the world probably know, rice expands in your stomach and makes you feel more full 15-30 minutes after you've stopped eating. So there I was, trying to run (or at least walk briskly) to the subway station, is a belly packed tightly with ever-expanding rice. I made it to the Rome métro stop, caught the next train and transferred to the 4 line at Barbès-Rochechouart, then transferred and caught the 9 at Strasbourg Saint-Denis, getting off one stop later at Bonne Nouvelle.

Through the miracle of good timing and a great deal of running down subway station corridors, I made it into the guest line by 0h51. I had nine minutes to make it past the front door. There was a group of six people near the back of the line who seemed to be both waiting in line but also waiting for another person or people to join them. I took advantage of the ambiguity and stood behind them...then beside them...then in front of them by the time we had reached the front of the line. Mercifully, things were still pretty quiet in the cash lineup, so the guest line moved quickly. At 0h57, with three minutes to spare, I made my way past the front doorman and down into the club.

Correspondant @ Le Rex: Sleeparchive, Onur Özur, Jennifer Cardini

0h00-2h30: Jennifer Cardini

Of course, there's a reason why passes expire at 1h00 and guestlists close at 1h30 here. The place was virtually empty when I arrived. There were barely 50 people in a space that usually holds hundreds. I took advantage of the sparse crowds to check my coat and get a drink, and then wandered around the floor to see if I recognized anybody. I sat down for a bit and waited, and eventually I saw Fantômette come in. Fantô and I chatted, wandered about the room people-watching, and waited for the rest of the crew to show up. S. and D. were supposed to be showing up with a bunch of friends; it was past the deadline for the guestlist and they still hadn't arrived.

S. and D. and their crew eventually showed up around 2h30 (having paid full price at the door), and we hung out at the back of the club and chatted as we waited for Sleeparchive to set up for his set. Jennifer Cardini's set was actually very good (she even dropped that old "helicopter" track by Plastikman!), but I have to admit that it wasn't the main attraction for me. Cardini's sets are always consistently good, but I have rarely been blown away by them, either. I suspect part of this is that I've almost only seen her spin as a warm-up DJ, so I don't know what she would offer as a headliner. Nonetheless, it was a far sight better than most of what I heard last night, so I was pretty happy.

2h30-4h00: Sleeparchive

If Nathan Fake's live set last Thursday was a bit abstract and pointillist, Sleeparchive's set was two steps closer to the dancefloor-oriented minimalism of the Berlin scene. The set was great, with a punchy sound that occasionally departed into distorted or nebulous episodes, but mostly remained throbbing. There was a great deal of forward drive to the whole thing, I felt, which is rather hard to do in a live set. Part of what might have made his set the more coherent one was that it sounded like he was mixing together both individual loops and entire tracks in whatever software he was using (I'm pretty sure it was Ableton Live again). Either way, I really enjoyed the set.

The place was PACKED from the moment his set started, so I had trouble being able to physically enjoy his performance much beyond nodding my head. As it was, I still had a belly full of rice, so I wasn't feeling very nimble. Add to that an overheated, smoky room packed to capacity and squashed near the front, and I just wasn't in the mood. I still really enjoyed the set, but I can't help but feel that I would've had a better time if I had had room to move.

D. and her friends got sick of the press of the crowd and moved off to the side of the room for a breath of fresh air, leaving S. and I to hang out. Fantômette disappeared and reappeared from time to time throughout the set, although she mostly hung out near the stairs and railing the the left of the DJ booth. A little while later, I split off from S. to move to the front and take pictures of the set. Something about the intense red lighting prevented me from taking any good photos, but I managed to get a lot of video.

4h00-6h00: Onur Özur

I had heard a bit of Onur Özur's set at the Watergate in Berlin early in May, but I missed most of his set that time, because I headed off to Berghain / Panorama Bar. I was able to stick around for about half of his set this time (I left just after 5h00), and was really glad I did. The set was a bit less intense than Sleeparchive's, but more danceable. Many of the tracks had a house-y feel, and a lot of his set seemed to traverse the space between minimal techno and minimal house.

The video that I got of him doesn't do the set justice, as it remember it as more dynamic and more spatialized. Of course, this recording is from a simple mono microphone that doesn't pick up anything in the low ranges, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Also, Onur is clearly not very photogenic; he's actually quite cute in a way that I don't find to be true for very skinny men like him, but none of the photos of took of him came out well. Similarly, every photo I find of him on the net is similarly unflattering, even if it's a professional job.

So, the lesson here is that you should trust my taste in music and men, even when the evidence I provide isn't so compelling...

Rex Trilogy II: Interview and Jack de Marseille

After sleeping in a bit to recover from last night, I spent a large part of my day running errands. Perhaps most importantly, I finally dragged those three boxes of books and sweaters of to the nearest post office. Each one of them was a bit over the 7kg limit, so I was carrying somewhere between 23 and 24 kilos in total. I slung them into a combination of hefty bags and then nearly killed myself getting them 1 block down the street. By the second block, I came across a bus stop that was in the direction I was going. I waited for the bus, rode it for only one stop, and then got off right in front of the post office.

I picked the main post office in Les Lilas, technically in the banlieue outside Paris, rather than the post office closer to me at Porte des Lilas, because this was was big and open and generally less miserable-looking. After waiting in line for several minutes, I noticed that everyone in front of me was waiting to cash social security checks, money orders and so on, while a "boutique" selling pre-paid envelopes was also weighing and posting packages. Since my boxes were ready and pre-packaged, I switched to the much shorter boutique line and waited a few more minutes.

Thankfully, I had chosen the right line. Just as I was being served, a man came from some other line and walked up the front and demanded to be served. He was obviously angry about having to wait in another line, but this is how French bureaucracy works, and the post office is in many ways its platonic ideal. When the woman at the desk told him to either wait in line or go speak to a supervisor, he marched off around the corner and starting yelling up a storm at some very unimpressed-looking man with a clipboard. I took the opportunity to commiserate with the woman at the desk, making clichéd comments like, "Some people are just poorly-raised," and "I used to work in retail, I totally empathize." This seemed to have the desired effect, as she was very patient with me as I dropped of three packages, bought three more packages, and also bought three pre-paid envelopes for some other stuff I have to send.

With everything taken care of and three new boxes under my arm, I headed back home. I spent most of the afternoon and evening catching up on blogging and emails (I was almost a week behind on blog entries since Carla's visit). By about 22h00, it was time to head over to my friend S.' new apartment to interview him. He had been kind enough to give me a bit of his time before tonight's outing to Le Rex to let me pick his brains. I headed over to his place and hung out with his roommate, his girlfriend and their friends; after a little while, the rest of them headed off to a nearby bar while S. and I sat down to the interview.

As is often the case with interviews, I came with a set questions that I promptly deemed insufficient and abandoned; nevertheless, it was useful to have a set of general questions that I could fall back on during lulls in conversation. Indeed, the interview turned into a sort of extended conversation, as I would ask him a broad question, he would say something interesting, I would focus on what I found interesting, and then we'd chatter about it for 20 minutes. An additional challenge to this whole endeavour, however, was the fact that we were conducting it in French. My French may be good, but it's hard enough to articulate my thoughts about my project in English; it's a whole other struggle to translate the po-mo jargon and the specially-chosen English terms into French. There were many moments when I had to pause and re-start my train of thought with a new set of terms. If anything, I suppose, it was a good lesson in just how much our thought is shaped by the languages available to us.

Thankfully, I caught all of this on my iPod, so I didn't have to worry about taking notes. I bought the Griffin iTalk a long time ago, which is this little accessory for iPods that records sound through it's own internal microphone or through any mic that you plug into it. I had bought a cheap electret cavalier mic to record the conversation, but when I ran some tests the night before, I discovered that the internal mic actually worked better than the electret mic. I think part of it is that the mic is internal to a rather resonant casing (the accessory is shaped to continue the form of the iPod, so it probably has a lot of empty space). Either way, I only had to take occasional notes that would later serve as guides when I had to transcribe this.

We managed to put in nearly 1.5 hours of conversation before we had to leave to meet the rest of the group at Le Rex. S. now lives close to the Rex, so we headed off on foot; wandering through sidestreets that we hoped would serve as shortcuts. A few blocks away from Le Rex, we got a call from S.'s girlfriend, saying that they were running late and just hopping into a cab right now. S. was feeling rather peckish, so we stopped at a kebab stand for a bit. As it turns out, we took too long to eat; as S. was finishing his fries, he got a call from his girlfriend, asking him where the hell he was. The rest of the group was already at the front of the line, apparently, so S. told them to go inside and we would catch up with them. By the time we were on our way over, I checked the time on my cellphone and realized that it was already 1h30. Aw damn.

So we had to pay our way in that night (13€), which made things all the more bitterly ironic when the music for the first 2/3 of the night was pretty...well...bad.

Automatik vs. Technorama: Slam and Jack de Marseille

1h30?-4h30: Slam

I've been overwhelmed by DJ sets before; at times, such as during Kraft's set last night, I've been underwhelmed; but this time, I was just whelmed. I didn't love Slam's set, but I didn't hate it either. I didn't clap my hands over my ears and run screaming, but I was having a really hard time getting excited about this duo's set. I will acknowledge that they were indeed spinning techno of some sort, and they were indeed capable of mixing records together (or, in this case, mp3's of records run through Final Scratch). But they were missing the hard-to-articulate extra stuff that makes a good set not only functionally danceable and stylistically recognizable, but also fun and exciting.

For one thing, the set felt very flat. There were regularly-spaced moments of climax and breakdown, but they totally failed to entrain me in their movements. Some part of me recognized that, "Oh, now is the time to be excited," but my body just wasn't resonating.

Also, the track selection didn't really surprise or excite me. All the tracks were certainly techno, but of a very generic and and slightly dated sound that made me feel as if they had done all their music shopping in the "Electronica" bins of the Virgin megastore in 2002. Again, it wasn't bad, it just wasn't...well...much of anything.

I'm actually surprised at my own ineloquence at pinpointing what was wrong with the set. It's like I had absentmindedly skimmed a novel for a grade-school literature class, and now I'm trying to improvise a book report on it. I may add on some more commentary in the comments section of this post if I can think of a better way of articulating my (non-)feelings about this set.

Either way, they were a hit with the crowd, although they rarely acknowledged their fans. Much like last night during Kraft's set, we all kept on checking in with each other, curious to see if one of us would start to like it. S. and his girlfriend, D., gave up and left about halfway through, but the rest of us stick it out for all 3 hours of their extended set.

I only managed to get a couple of pictures, but I got three pretty decent videos, including one taken a higher spot in the club, giving a nice view of how the lighting system works at the Rex (see last video).

4h30-6h00: Jack de Marseille

I had never heard of Jack de Marseille, but Fantômette told me that his was the first DJ performance that really surprised her and drew her attention to the genre. His set was great, with very much the sort of sound that I would expect from someone that has been spinning (successfully) for many years. There were a few older and "classic"-sounding tracks, but mostly new stuff that probably fell somewhere between the techno and progressive house streams. I'm usually not a big fan of progressive tracks (they seem to be obsessed with 10-minute-long buildups and little else), but he made it work. It also helped that he sped up the tempo of the music in comparison to Slam. Overall, there was something more intense and driving about his set that I quite enjoyed.

At 5h30, as I was heading out to catch the first métro train, I walked up the steps from the basement-level club toward the exterior door. As I turned a corner between flights of steps, I saw a young woman sitting on the steps and leaning on the railing, looking as if she planned to spend the night there. "I wonder what she's doing over here when the party is still going on downstairs?" At that point, I stepped in a puddle of something warm and chunky.

Oh.

Cooking, Drinking, Clubbing

Well, today started out as a low-intensity day and turned into a rather packed one. After getting out of bed rather late in the morning, I headed off to the open-air market at Belleville to do a bit of food shopping. I was having brunch at a friend's house the next day, so I was hoping to find the necessary foodstuffs to make a few dishes for tomorrow. In the end, I picked up a huge handful of hot red peppers and some brousse sheep's-milk cheese for salsa huancaína, a few mangos and some more peppers for my mango-jalapeño salsa, and a bunch of cilantro for a chimichurri-style onion pickle.

I took a break and had some tom yum soup and green papaya salad at a Thai restaurant in that neighborhood, then headed back home, with a stop by an Antillean store to buy some cassava/yucca/manioc. I spent the rest of the evening preparing as much of the food as possible for Sunday morning. Ironically, I almost forgot to make anything to eat for dinner. At the last minute, I whipped up some quinoa noodles (interesting, but I don't think I'd buy them again) and then headed off.

La Petite Maison Electronique @ On Cherche Encore

Nathan and Fantômette of Be My Chose were running another one of their "pre-clubbing" events at On Cherche Encore, so I headed over there to hang out and say hi. When I first got there, around 23h00, Nathan and Fanto weren't spinning quite yet (another DJ, 3c was on the decks), so I hung out with both of them and chatted for a while about what they had been up to since last Friday.

By around midnight, the Be My Chose duo took over the decks and started spinning. They use Final Scratch (a digital-via-vinyl mixing interface and program similar to Serato Scratch, discussed yesterday), so I spent a fair bit of time peering over their shoulders and watching them work. As far as I could tell, the interface was very similar to Serato Scratch, but without as much of the "visual aids" for mixing that Serato offers. Nonetheless, it was interesting to watch them a bit more closely and see how they organize their sets and how they manage transitions.

Transitioning between tracks, which is probably THE central act of mixing, is actually an interesting and challenging problem. Well after you've beatmatched your two tracks (i.e., adjusted the tempo of the incoming track to match the playing track and then lined-up the beats between the two), you have to consider how to bring the two tracks together. The most basic options you have include simply doing an abrupt cross-cut--cut the old track and bring in the new at the same time--or gradually fade in the new track into the old one, wait for a little while, and then fade out the old track.

However, not only are these methods a bit boring when used excessively, but they pose potential problems when elements from one track conflict with elements of another track. It may be that a set of musical chords from one track is in a different key than a melody in the other track. Or, perhaps there's some rhythmic ornamentation in the mid and/or upper freq's on one track that sound lovely on their own, but sound out-of-place when superimposed on those of the other track. Most importantly--especially if you're mixing without the help of visual aids for beatmatching--since the bass kick drum is almost always 4/4 in techno and house (and various other EDM genres), you risk creating some really awful beat collisions if your tracks are even microscopically out-of-sync. In this last case, the common solution is to "kill" the bass on one of the tracks (using the EQ knobs on the mixer, usually), mix them together, and then mix out the old track. However, there are many more problems and possible solutions to this situation, most of which involve manipulating the levels of various frequency bands (usually hi, mid and lo), using filters, and taking advantage of the structure of the tracks to mix in/out during texturally sparse moments, such as the breakdown or the intro.

So, it was great to watch Nathan and Clothilde doe their work and see how they make bring tracks in and out. While my dissertation project doesn't focus as much on the specificities of DJ technology, Mark Butler's upcoming book will apparently cover a lot of this topic. Plus, that boy has what appears to be many, many DJ sets videotaped with a good view of the gear, so he has a very enviable archive. At least I covet it...

Anyway, I didn't just exclusively trainspot on my friends. I did chat a bit with a few folks that I recognized from last Friday or from previous events. As is often the case here, discussion tended to revolve around travel and work: where you're from, where you want to go, how the club scene compares in various cities, what you do for work and/or what you want to do for work, what you study or did study, etc. As formulaic as it may sound, there's something pleasant and intimate about these rituals of mutual discovery.

By approximately 1h00, I headed off toward Le Rex to hear Apparat and Modeselektor....

Apparat vs. Automatik @ Le Rex: Apparat, Modeselektor, Das Glow

[In case you're wondering, I haven't been posting flyers as frequently as before, because Flyerweb database hasn't been as comprehensive as before. Not sure why...]

???-3h00: Apparat

I'm not sure if someone was spinning earlier as a warm-up, but I got there too late to catch that. In fact, I only really caught the last 30 minutes or so of his set.

Even though I arrived there around 1h30, the line was surprisingly long. Clearly, Apparat and Modeselektor can draw a crowd. I ended up, oddly enough, sandwiched between a group of kids from the Berry region of France, and a group from Bayonne (France / Basque region). One of the guys from Bayonne liked my zip-up top and said so, which started a chain of conversation about where I got it (Chicago), where I'm from (Canada), how I know Chicago (school) and why I'm here (see before), and so on. As soon as I declared that I was current living in Paris, he asked me if I knew how long this lineup would take. Well, normally this would've been a 30-minute wait, but things were just a bit too busy for this early in the evening. Anyway, I said it would take probably more than 30 minutes, but even I couldn't have predicted that it would take almost an hour...

While we were waiting in line, the two groups of people started chatting a bit and making jokes about each other's regions. I've noticed that most of these sorts of regional conversations in France revolve around food: "I love that ham you guys make in Bayonne, but what's up with that cheese you make?" "Oh whatever, does your region even have cheese?" "Are you nuts? Haven't you even heard of the crottin du Bery?! Hey, Alice, check this out: this guy is insulting our cheese!" "Oh, now it's ON." And so on... Anyway, it all seemed like good-natured fun, as evidenced by the fact that both groups were soon sharing beer and joints while waiting in line.

When we finally got in (2h30!!), I parted ways with the group (they were busy trying to get bottle service), checked my coat, and then headed over to the front of the club to see what was going on. The guard at the door had told me there were no pictures allowed, so I had to be pretty stealthy about taking photos and video. As a result, I don't have any good photos of Apparat, and the only video I have of him actually shows more of the two guys from Modeselektor in the foreground, with Apparat (in the black shirt, scraggly hair) working on his laptop in the background.

Apparat's set (what I heard of it) was really good, but not particularly danceable. Although everyone around me seemed to be very much enjoying his set, it was hard to be inspired to do much more than bob your head rhythmically. The set seemed like somewhere between "atmospheric" broken-beat and trip-hop. Lots of long, sustained effects over churning but somehow static beats. Anyway, I managed to sneak a video, so you can get an idea of the sound:

3h00-5h00: Modeselektor

By the time Modeselektor came on, the house was PACKED with people, so I barely moved at all from my spot. I only shifted back and forth to avoid this one group of guys near me that were determined to start a mosh pit (yeah, you can imagine how well that went down). Also, there was this tall guy next to me who nearly took my eye out with his elbows. Oh, and there was this other really drunk guy who had a lit cigarette in his hand as he danced, waving it around at eye-level. I began to feel very protective of my eyes...

Anyway, Modeselektor's set was mostly fantastic. The majority of the set fell within that "minimal" category here in Europe that seems to sit somewhere between minimal techno and microhouse. However, this was definitely one of those minimal-maximal sets, where the textures and structures might be minimal, but the sound was set for maximum intensity. They kept the bass LOUD for the entire set, while managing to keep the hi's and mid's at a level that wasn't hard on the ears. I could describe their sound more, but I actually managed to get a whopping 7 snippets of video of them, so you can listen yourself. Unfortunately, my camera doesn't pick up bass very well, so you have to imagine a very heavy bass kick under all of this. It's amazing how different a track sounds when you cut out all the bass frequencies.

Either way, it was a very high-intensity set, and everyone was going crazy. Both members of the duo had great stage presence as well, yelling at the crowd, gesturing, mimicking ass-slapping, and generally looking like they were having a great time. They were also wearing these cute t-shirts that said "I am Gernot's left hand" and "I am Szary's right hand." I'm guessing that this had something to do with Gernot's hand being bandaged (the guy with the shaved head); apparently there were supposed to have done a live set, but instead they did a vinyl set because Gernot's hand was all busted.

Toward the end of the set, things took an odd but amusing turn, as they moved through classic Detroit techno (Jeff Mills!) through to happy hardcore and gabber, through to French rap tracks, and ending with this hilarious and campy electronic version of J.S. Bach's Prelude in C that sounds a lot like something Wendy Carlos did. In the last three videos below, you can hear them drop two classic techno tracks (Jeff Mills' "The Bells," and I think "Jerical") as well as a hardcore track. This last recording is muffled and black because the security guards had seen me taking video and told me to put my camera away. Nonetheless, I couldn't resist recording some of that! Also, one of the French rap tracks they played is currently available to listen on their Myspace page (click on "BANDE DE MECS SYMPA").

5h00-6h00: Das Glow

At least, I think it was Das Glow. Anyway, he started up a relatively hard techno set, which quickly got rather noisy and then made its way into a bit of electro and house. In another situation, I might've really enjoyed it, but I was already a bit tired from the madness that was Modeselektor's set, so I started to get ready to leave.

As I was heading out of the club, who should I see but Nathan! Since he hadn't actually slept since Friday, he had told me back at On Cherche Encore that he was going to bed after his set. Somehow, he had managed to find a second wind, as he was cheerfully dancing up a storm. He introduced me to a bunch of his friends, who I recognized from On Cherche Encore earlier that night. I stayed with them for a little while and danced, but then eventually threw in the towel and headed home.

Getting home was a bit crazy. I tried to take the night bus and some guy tried really aggressively to sell me hash. When it became clear that he wasn't going to leave me alone, I headed off to the métro station to wait for the métro to start running. At 5h30, the station opened and headed in. For some reason, the first train took nearly half an hour, and when it did come, two guys were about to have a fight in my car. As is almost always the case, it was less a violent encounter and more an opportunity for both males to grandstand and show off their manly selves in front of their friends, who were making a big show of holding them back. When I got off several stations later, they were still yelling at each other, with not actually physical contact. Boys!

Spinning and post-partying

Well, I ended up not going out last night (Thursday), since I hadn't seen anything that caught my eye. I had given a moment's thought to Le Pulp, but since they had been threatening to close since February, I just presumed nothing was going on. As I found out today, both Miss Kitten and Scratch Massive were playing that night and apparently the place was rammed with people. Ah well, you win some, you lose some.

Anyway, I had been invited to go over to F.'s place (a guy I met and hung out with last Friday), so sent him a text message this morning to see what he was up to. As it turns out, he had gone out the night before to Le Pulp (after ditching Le Rex, because it was apparently not very good), and was currently hosting a little after-party at his place. It was already 11h00 when he called me to tell me this, so clearly they had been going strong since last night.

I got myself together and headed over to his place, which was a bit far away (on the other side of the city and actually outside the city proper), so I got there at almost 14h00. Most of the other party-goers had gone home, except for one of F.'s co-workers, who was sort of half-crashing, half-chilling on his couch. F. had apparently been spinning on his decks since they got back from the club, and he was eager to have me join him. It was actually really nice to get to spin again. I left my turntables and vinyl back in Chicago, so I haven't really been able to do much of any of that here in Paris.

F. was using Serato Scratch Live, which is a cheaper clone of the very popular DJ software Final Scratch. What both of these programs do is allow you to work with your digital music through vinyl. Effectively, you get two vinyl records that transmit timecodes instead of sound. Then you connect the output of these records to your computer (through a firewire box specially made for the program), which takes these time codes and sends back out the corresponding audio for a digital track that you have on your laptop. If you change the speed of your turntables, stop or rewind your records, the digital recording will do the same. For DJ's who are used to vinyl, this allows them to access all of their digital tracks and actually mix them with their vinyl recordings as well. What's particularly great about it is how a DJ can still use the very intuitive and tactile interface of the vinyl record, but get access to digital recordings at the same time. One final advantage of all of this is that you can travel with one pair of records and your laptop, rather than many pounds of records.

When I first started spinning tracks with F., my mixes were really rough and a bit late. This was partially because the headphones were dodgy and the Cue levels were post-EQ, but mostly because I haven't touched a turntable since last summer. A while later, I noticed that F. was looking at the computer screen a lot while beatmatching, and I realized that Serato Scratch comes with a whole bunch of visual aids that I had not been using. There's this really convenient "tempo" display up top that shows how the two tracks do (or don't) line up, using automatic beat-detection to represent the tempo in colour-coded spikes. All you have to do is slowly shift the pitch on your turntables until the two tempos line up. Once they're at the same tempo, there's another field in between the two tracks that shows the main beats of both tracks as they're happening. You can use this representation to bring the two tracks into sync. It's amazing how much this visual aid helped me spin. (You can see what I'm talking about by downloading the Demo video called "Visual Aids" here.)

That much being said, I'm still a bit embarrassed that I couldn't do it all by ear.

I hung out with F. (and his girlfriend / my co-worker, G.) until about 17h00, and then headed home. It was really fun to hang out with the two of them, and I'm looking forward to hanging out with them again soon. When I got home, I took care of a bit of blogging, a lot of emails and reading, and then thought about going out. For some reason, I just wasn't feeling up to it--not sick, just tired--so I hit the hay and promised myself that I'd go out Saturday night. On the other hand, what I did do that night was book tickets to spend the weekend in Berlin next week. YAY!! I can't wait.

Against all odds, Luis goes clubbing

Despite how my night ended yesterday, I woke up feeling a fair bit better. I puttered around the apartment, took care of a bit of work, and finally got around to getting my MySpace page up and running. I had delayed "publishing" the MySpace profile until I had at least one bit of music to upload as well, and that part of the project had been lagging behind. I managed to throw together a little track from two audio samples, some MIDI instruments, and a fair bit of audio FX--all of it through Ableton Live. Once I find a decent mp3 hosting site for all of the audio examples, I'll make a short "how I did it" post, explaining how I manipulated a few short recordings of my hand brushing and tapping the body of my laptop into an actual track. For the moment, you can hear the finished track on my MySpace page here.

Working on that track and then uploading it took the larger part of the day, so at 21h00 I found myself getting ready to head out. Although I wasn't due at the Rex that night until 1h30, I had two friends in town that I was going to meet for drinks and possibly clubbing. I picked them up from their neighbourhood and took them down to a bar/café on Place des Vosges that I'm particularly fond of. The food was decent and the beer was fine, but we had one of those especially saucy waiters whose demeanour seemed to waver between acerbic wit and contempt hidden behind humour. We took a little walk through the Marais and ended up in the gay district for another round of drinks. By approximately 1h00, we all headed off in our own directions. I was on a guestlist that expired at 1h30, so I had to make a quick dash to the Rex.

45: Kiki & Silversurfer Live, MIA and Mlle Caro

0h00-2h30: Mlle Caro

I zipped over to the Rambuteau métro station and waited on the platform. At first, the sign on the platform said "Next Train: 1 minute." After a minute, the number disappeared and the sign was blank. Another minute later, the sign lit up again and said "7 minutes." Well, there was no way I would make it my métro at this point, so I ran up to the surface and hailed a taxi. My hope was that the cost of the taxi ride would be balanced out by the 13€ I would save by getting to the line in time. Despite the fact that the Gods of One-Way Streets were plotting against me, we managed to make it there with about 15 minutes to spare.

I rolled out of the car and got into the guestlist line. There were maybe 20 other people there, so I was optimistic about getting in under the 1h30 deadline. Then, all of a sudden, the speed of the guest line decreased drastically. For every 20 people that went through the cash-only line facing us, only 1 or 2 would go through from the guest line. It was pretty clear what they were up to: when the deadline for the validity of the guestlist passed (1h30), suddenly the guest line started moving and the door man shrugged his shoulders, saying "You're too late, now. You'll have to pay full price."

A few minutes (and 13€) later, I found myself inside, eyeing the line for the coat check. It was an unmitigated mess, and I was wearing a relatively light sweater, so I just kept it on and headed off to the dancefloor. By the time I ran into Fantomette and Nathan, Mlle Caro had pretty much finished her set, which is why I have nothing interesting to say about her set.

2h30-3h30: Kiki & Silversurfer Live

As the music paused for a moment and I heard a lot of cheering, I noticed that they were switching from Mlle Caro's vinyl setup to the dual-laptop setup of Kiki and Silversurfer. I parted ways with the Be My Chose crew and headed up to the front of the room to get some pictures and video. After getting a few pictures of the two of them from the front (Kiki is the twinky blond one, while Silversurfer is the swarthy one with the hat), I went around the side of the stage area and took a few pictures of their laptop setup from over their shoulders.

Essentially, both of them had Ableton Live running on their laptops (which were both Dells, I think), each connected to FireWire audio interfaces (which allows the laptops to manage multiple audio and MIDI channels, rather than the built-in "line in" jack), each connected to an outboard midi controller (so that they can control the tracks in Ableton Live using physical knobs and sliders, rather than a mouse pointer) as well as a shared multi-channel mixer (I didn't count the number of channels, but you can see it in the pictures below).

While taking these pictures, I was interested to note a certain division of labor going on. Silversurfer's laptop only had one track playing in Live, which he seemed to rarely touch. On the other hand, Kiki had numerous loops on several tracks running in Live. While Kiki was entirely engrossed in the manipulation of the various elements he had running in Live, Silversurfer spent more time working directly on the mixer, manipulating EQ levels for the channels. A few minutes later, things shifted and Silversurfer started spending more time at his laptop.

I have to admit to being not as excited about their set as I had expected. Based on the individual tracks I had heard from them, I expected something a bit more minimal and glitchy in texture. Instead, while they certainly maintained a formal minimalism (i.e., lots of repetition, slow or infrequent changes), their sound was closer to a noisy, thick-textured, big-room techno set. While this in itself wasn't disappointing (I can definitely enjoy thumping techno), I found the pacing of the set kind of off. I think this is a common risk with live sets rather than vinyl. When you're working with vinyl, you have a set of "finished" tracks (although they're always "finished" with an eye toward being recombined with other tracks) that usually come with their own well-proportioned topography. As long as you line up the next track with a breakdown or an upcoming climax, you can usually be assured a great overall pace at the 5-10 minute level. Outside of that, it's still very much up to the DJ's selection skills to create trajectories and pacing that span the entire set.

Live sets, on the other hand, tend to come out of improvisation with a collection of pre-made materials (loops, samples, etc.). The form is much more open-ended, and it is up to the performer to think about pacing and variations of intensity at the 1-minute level, 5-minute level, 10-minute....pan-set level, all at the same time. As a result, the quality of a live set's pacing rests a great deal on the performer's ability to set and maintain a good large-scale rhythm.

That much being said, I still had a good time and managed to get a few choice bits of video:

3h30-5h00: MIA

I really like MIA's set a lot more. Her selection of tracks were a bit more microhouse and minimal, with an emphasis on complex, crystalline patterns in the high end, and punchy bass. In general, the pacing of her set was better, working up the crowd with "arrivals" and "departures" (see waaay back for what I mean by this) without becoming erratic or boring. She seemed to have a good feel of how long a particular "moment" should last before she moves on to something new.

Hot man-on-man action after the images & video!

Seriously!

During MIA's set (and also a bit during Kiki & Silversurfer's live set), I noticed a group of male friends who were hanging out near the front of the crowd and having a great time. Much like the homosocial behaviour I reported on way back at the Techno Parade (and which I've seen in many other contexts since then), these guys were engaging in forms of sexual play with each other while dancing--until a cute girl walked into their midst. One moment they were all over each other and mimicking same-sex sexual acts, the next moment they all re-oriented themselves toward the hot female in their midst their "divining rods" all pointing in her direction. As soon as she had passed on (and after usually some failed attempts at winning her favour), the boys were back to feeling each other up. While you sometimes see a bit of this play among (presumably) straight guys in North America, you rarely see it at this intensity: they were grinding on each other, crotch-to-butt, rubbing and pinching each other's nipples, licking necks and biting ears. Even when a girl might deign to dance with one of them for a moment, often another guy would dance against him from behind, forming an unexpected female-male-male sandwich (instead of the usual girl-in-the-middle thing). I think what stuck with me the most was how sustained a lot of it was. If, in Chicago or Toronto, your average str8 techno boy wanted to joke around with his male friend, he might approach him and grind on him / smack his ass for a few seconds but then quickly pull away and laugh, creating a certain "corrective" distance. In this case, however, these guys would casually grab their friend's hips and grind on them for minutes on end, without the "Ha Ha! This is funny because we're not gay!!" gesture at the end.

Anyway, I still haven't decided what I think of this, but I wanted to mention it and sort of add it to the "archive" that is this blog...

5h00-6h00: Kiki & Silversurfer Vinyl Set

It took me a few minutes to realize that Kiki & Silversurfer had taken over the DJ booth from MIA. Their vinyl set was better and well-paced, but by then I was tired and ready to head home. Keep in mind that about 24 hours ago I wasn't feeling very well at all. I kept dancing until the subway reopened (5h30) and then headed up to the surface and made my way home. I realized as I was getting on the subway that--aside from a few sips of water stolen from friends--I had not bought anything to drink while inside the Rex. I took a certain satisfaction in knowing that what Rex took from me at the door, I took back from them at the bar (in reduced consumption of alcohol). I know it's an empty satisfaction, but you'll have to allow me this one comfort....