Halloween in Chicago: Partytime!

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

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

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

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

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

The grand mea-culpa update

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

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

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

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

Part the First: NYC w/ Carla

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

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

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

Part the Third: Carla in Paris

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

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

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

Part the Fifth: Kristy & Iyn’s Visit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snax Club, Berghain, Picnics and Fisting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round One: Snax Club @ Berghain/Lab.Oratory

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

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

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

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

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

Bouncer: What are you going to wear inside?

Sicilian Dude: What do you mean?

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

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

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

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

Me: I’ll go naked.

Bouncer: What?

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

B: Hm, well, totally naked? Seriously?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round Two: Panorama Bar

9h00-12h00: Daniel Stefanik

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

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

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

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

12h00-13h00: Boris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LMGM: Yep! I sure do.

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

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

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

LMGM: Yes, totally.

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

13h00-??: nd_baumecker

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

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

some bumps in the RATP's politeness campaign

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

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

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

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

Well played, well played.

Taxes and other demons

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

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

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

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

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

Fishy Failures, Part 2 (plus a concert)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strikes are like Gay Pride, minus the glitter.

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

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

Wherein the ethics of pedagogy are unexpectedly discussed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bingo Bongo by Paul Kalkbrenner

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

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

The Two-Day, Four-Party Marathon

Daytime

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

Apéros

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

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

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

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

12h30: The False Start

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

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

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

1h30: Spreepiraten @ Maria am Ostbahnhof

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5h30: Champagnerama @ Kindl Brauerei

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9h30: Berghain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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