After sleeping in a fair bit, I rolled out of bed and was immediately caught by the announcement of the most recent Best of Craigslist. For almost two hours, I was held captive by the crazyness of Craigslist, including this, this, this and this. Oh, and this and this.
DJ rang my door around noon (he's moving into my building right now) and we went out for lunch. We headed away from Paris and into Lilas (the once-village now suburb that abuts Paris and pretty much our backyard). We headed to an Italian pizza place that DJ knew and had a full, leisurely meal. We need to stop taking an apéritif and digestif plus wine every time we eat out. Anyway, we lumbered back to our building and DJ continued with his quest to move his crap into the building.
I caught up with Anatoly (who has been in Geneva for the last little while) and we made plans to meet at Batofar to catch some microhouse and then head over to Nouveau Casino for the minimal techno night there. Alas, it never went beyond "plans," because a little while later my tonsils got sore and my lymph nodes began to swell. Hooray! I guess I was bound to get the flu at some point this winter (nevermind that it's practically spring, dammit).
Since I have an iron-clad immune system, there was still the possibility that whatever I was having would come and go by the evening, so I took a megadose of vitamin C and some ibuprofen, drank a lot of water, and got some food in me (mostly leftover arroz chaufa).
Later that evening, DJ came by after his move was done and had some leftovers and whiskey with me. I swear, I think I'm going to create a new Label Tag for my blog called "Luis&DjEatParis" or something like that. Anyway, we hung out for a little while, I still felt like crap. I sent a penitent text to Anatoly, took a nap to see if things would get better, then texted Anatoly again at about 2am to tell him that there was no way I could go out. Rather than be pissed off for standing him up, Anatoly very kindly wished me a speedy recovery. With promises to make it up to him later, I headed to bed and tried not to think too hard about the great music I was missing.
In the ongoing development of our food-based relationship (i.e., I cook a load of food, he brings the alcohol), DJ came over tonight to help me eat the mountainous load of arroz chaufa (note: the recipe in this link isn't the same as my recipe). I haven't had or made arroz chaufa since I left Chicago last August, and I forgot how much I missed it until I made it. Since it is essentially a Peruvian-Chinese version of fried rice, I prepared all the materials ahead of time (chopped green onions, rice, chicken or beef or pork in a soy-ginger-cassonade glaze) and whipped them together with DJ when he got there. The results were FANTASTIC, but I have to admit that arroz chaufa is total comfort food for me. I've grown up with this food and I have many happy memories of all of us kids rushing to the table to wolf down as much of this stuff as possible. So I realize that any arroz chaufa that follows my mother's recipe will always be amazing to me. On the other hand, DJ made my inner latina mom proud by valiantly attempting a second heaping plateful, so I think it went well. And this was after we ate sliced dry sausage with our apéritif (very french), purple potato salad, and a simple green salad (I was really channeling the stereotypical latina mother and preparing too much food).
Ironically, I totally forgot to take pictures of the food prep for the arroz chaufa, so the recipe + photoblogging will have to wait. On the other hand, I did get a few pictures of the purple potato salad. By the way, if you haven't tried purple potatoes (a.k.a. vitelotte in France), you totally should. They're harder to find in the USA or Canada, but they're pretty available near the Andes or in Europe (when in season).
Purple Potato & Rosemary Salad
Ingredients
Approx 1/2-kg of purple potatoes (10 or so small ones)
One onion, chopped
Two sweet peppers of any colour, chopped (I used white and purple)
The juice of one lemon
Mayo as needed (no more than 1 cup)
1 leek, chopped and sautéed lightly in butter (optional)
Dijon mustard (optional)
Salt and/or pepper to taste
2 sprigs of rosemary
Preparation
Put the potatoes to steam (20 minutes in a pressure cooker with a basket, dunno about regular steamers). Place the rosemary in the basket to steam with potatoes, but reserve about half of it for later. I like to leave the skins on, because it's better for you, tastes better, and helps keep the purple colour from leaking into the water. Also, you can boil the potatoes rather than steam them, but they tend to lose their colour this way as well.
The important part is to mix almost all of the ingredients while the potatoes are still warm, so I suggest chopping up all of the other ingredients while the potatoes are cooking and having them ready to go, much like in the image below
When the potatoes are ready, remove from steamer and cut into cubes. Admire their adorably purple flesh. Snicker at the phrase "adorably purple flesh."
Chop the remaining rosemary and mix it in with the hot potatoes.
Add the remaining ingredients (except the mayo) and mix. Make sure the mixture is no longer very hot (high heat will curdle the mayo) and mix in the mayo. Serve!
That was the main title of a paper I was planning to submit to the next meeting of SEM (Society for Ethnomusicology), which will be in Columbus OH this fall. In the end, I went with something different. Here are the various versions I considered before making my final choice:
Choose Your Own Adventure: Self-Selection, Exclusion and Crowd Control in Parisian Nightclubs
Self-Selection for Less Rejection: The Management and Self-Management of Crowds in Parisian Nightclubs
"Sorry, you're not on the list": [subtitle from #1]
In the end, I took the subtitle from #1 and added the French equivalent of #3 (roughly speaking) to get this: "Desolé, c'est pas possible": Self-Selection, Exclusion and Crowd-Design in Parisian Nightclubs. And, in case you're interested, here's the amazingly brief abstract I submitted. For those of you who are not familiar with SEM, they have a very strict 250 word-count limit, which I respect and appreciate, but which can be a real pain in the ass when you have a lot of say. Thankfully, I managed to be very compact this time.
Nightclubs in Paris, as in many other large cities, trade not only on the design of their space and the music that fills it, but also on the clientele that pass through their doors. While the image of nightclub bouncers enforcing exclusive door policies is a common trope, this is not the only nor even the primary means of "designing" a crowd. Extending from arguments made by Sarah Thornton in her book, Club Cultures (1995), I will argue that crowd-design begins with a combination of self-selection and selective advertising; while rejection at the door plays an important role in motivating self-selection, the actions of club promoters and potential clubgoers help sublimate techniques of exclusion that often operate on criteria of distinction such as class, wealth, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.
Well, I took another day off work, slept in, tried to catch the tail-end of the market on place des fêtes, and then headed off to the grocery store next door to buy anything else that I needed. I got this thing called a roti de saumon et julienne, which looked like an oven-ready roll of salmon and ling cod. My great idea was that I was going to lay down several layers of vegetables (carrots, potatoes, onions, cauliflower, zucchini), a bit of rice, and then the roll on top, and them steam the whole vertical structure. I didn't realize two things:
the roll was actually a cylinder of what looked like reconstituted fish flesh held together by some binding coagulant wrapped in salmon and cod
the rice takes much longer to steam than anything else, which meant that the zucchini and cauliflower were practically mush by the time the rice was edible
I still ended up with a relatively healthy dinner, but it was a lot less exciting as a result. And that fish roll was pretty lame.
Anyway, I spent the rest of the night taking care of some final laundry tasks (I had been procrastinating for a LONG time) and finally firing off a bunch of emails that I've been needing to take care of. I also fooled around on Ableton Live for a while, discovering that you can do a lot of very fun things with a chain of effects and a couple of send channels. I'm going to post my results soon, hopefully.
[I only now realized that I mentioned "paper abstracts" in my title today, but in fact the abstract appears in tomorrow's entry. Sorry!]
[I also just realized that I didn't make risotto today, despite the title. What have I been smoking?!]
So, I took a day off work (the winter students are gone and the spring students haven't arrived yet) and took care of catching up on a bit of blogging as well as some more email. A far-too-large part of my day was dedicated to doing laundry, which was an unspeakable nightmare. I spent a large part of my day fighting with broken machines and dryer-stealing residents; I don't know how the designers of the building thought that 3 washers and dryers for 300 people would work. If I was wealthy, I would take my clothes to a cleaners rather than deal with this crap. On the other hand, if I was that wealthy, I wouldn't be living in this building. So touché.
Anyway, rather than go on about that, I want to show you this:
...and this...
...and also this.
So this is apparently a specialty food service, called "Living Tables", offered by Makeup by Julie. This is one of those things that I find both fantastically awesome and horrifying at the same time. The idea of turning furniture into humans or humans into furniture has all sorts of post-human implications, made even better by the fact that this is popping up in a themed-catering company rather than an avant-garde film. Do people want furniture that talks back? Do they want to use other humans as furniture? The main page advertises that these "living tables" will chat with guests "in character," which raises some questions about what some of these characters would say if people were eating hors d'oeuvres off their ass.
On the other hand, a lot of these "characters" are in fact generic stereotypes of particular ethnicities and classes. I'll give them credit for some consistency at least: they're happy to stereotype whites and white Europeans as well (French, Southern Belle, "Crazy Tourist, etc.). Also, they obviously put some thought into which stereotypes were safe to use and which ones weren't: there's a "spanish seniorita" but no "conchita, the paperless domestic"; there's an "african queen" but no "nightclub bouncer" or "DMV princess." There are no gay or aboriginal stereotypes (yet); the former one is sort of ironic, considering these two photos:
Essentially, there were three parts to my day, so let's make gratuitous use of headers:
Part 1: The Awakening
After getting home pretty late last night, I slept in till about midday and then tried to get myself together. I did the shower thing, I tried to nibble on some more bland food (still recovering from the food poisoning) and started working. In particular, I had a virtual pile of emails sitting in my inbox, overdue for reply. It seems as if, ever since I got to France, my email correspondence has become much more involved. I can literally spend hours replying to mail and still not be done.
Anyway, I did my best to clear out my inbox (with no success), and then headed out around 17h00
Part 2: Drinks at Solférino
I had an appointment with an anthropology prof that I had taken a really fantastic course with last winter. She was in town for a day before heading off with her partner to Barcelona, so I arranged to grab a drink with them near their hotel. We wandered into a brasserie near the Solférino métro station and ordered some drinks and a platter of oysters. It was really nice to catch up with her as well as bounce my ideas off of her. It was also nice to summarize my project again and get some probing questions; I had been forgetting to think about a lot of interesting questions that she brought up, and I have a few new books to read now.
Part 3: Finding Dinner
I got a call from DJ just as I was taking the métro back home. Apparently, he was planning to go out for dinner, but his dinner date had cancelled on him. Flattered to be his Plan B (just kidding, DJ), I headed back over to the Left Bank and waited for him to arrive. The plan was to go to a crêperie near Odéon that he was very fond of, so off we went, following his lead. A few minutes later, we come upon the creperie and they're closed.
That's OK, we're not too far from the Panthéon, and I know of that fantastic Italian restaurant, Terra Nera, right near there. So off we go, walking another mile or so. We get there a while later, and THAT restaurant is closed, too. Well fuck. Strike two.
I'm about to throw in the towel, when DJ points out that we could get moules frites (mussels and fries) at La Gueuze nearby. La Gueuze is a very Belgo-centric brasserie, serving a huge selection of international beers--but especially all the Trappist, Lambic, Gueuze, Faro and Fruit beers you can imagine. We each got a huge order of mussels and fries "paysanne" (i.e., with mushrooms and cream and lardons) and stuffed ourselves. Sooo, delicious.
Afterwards, we both headed back to our respective homes, we me realizing as I arrived that I still had a big pile of work to do. Oy.
Well, as I had mentioned at the end of yesterday's post, I was feeling pretty barf-tastic this morning and in no mood to do anything but convalesce. I slept in, then spent most of the day trying to re-hydrate myself and eating small portions of bland food (stale bread and soup). I also spent a bit of time blogging and reading stuff on the net, but most of the day was a loss, really.
However, I *did* have stuff to do that night, so I had to convince myself that I was actually in shape to go out. By approx 10pm, I had cleaned myself up and headed out the door
Be My Chose and Syl Sounday @ On cherche encore
This wasn't a club night so much as a bar night, running from 21h00 to 1h30. I got there around 22h00, in time to see the end of Syl Sounday's set. I hung around and caught most of Be My Chose's set (Fantomette and Nathan), but left around 1h00 to run over to the Rex for my next engagement.
While I was there, I ran into Laurent (fresh back from doing sound at a huge royal wedding in Riyadh), with whom I had a good long chat. It was great catching up with everyone and collecting recent news. Labelle Records was releasing an EP pretty soon, including a track by Laurent. At the same time, Be My Chose had separated from Labelle and created their own collective (whose name escapes me at the moment). Laurent also had some great stories about the trip to Riyadh (it was for a princess, who apparently wanted a "Versailles" theme for her wedding).
Aside from Nathan, Fantomette and Laurent, I saw about 8 other friends and acquaintances, which made me feel like my fieldwork was finally coming along. I was also reminded of how much this blog circulates outside of my knowledge; at least 4 different people approached me, saying "Hey! I like what you're doing with your blog! That review of that last party was great!" There was always a mixture of surprise and pleasure--like being seen naked when you sort of wanted to be seen anyway. There's something fun but also a bit risky about leaving a residue of yourself on the Internet for others to find. Speaking of which, I need to work on my MySpace profile!
I ran from the previous place to the nearest subway stop, where I ran into two friends, R. and C., who were also heading toward the Rex. We chatted about my PhD project and C. reminded me to make the pilgrimage to Berlin while I'm in Europe. We got to the Rex just before 1h30 (the cutoff time for guestlist), and R. and C. were kind enough to let me take their spare spot on the guestlist, so in we went. I also ran into S. in the lineup, who I've hung out with on previousoccasions.
Bloody Mary's set was actually really nice. Although I don't have any video clips of her performance, I could describe it as very much microhouse: take the syncopation and funk of house, the punchy bass and thin textures of minimal techno and add the unconventional timbre of glitch music. I would've actually been happier to see her spin the closing set at 4h30, rather than Benno Blome. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the last hour or so of her set.
Unfortunately, I didn't really get a good portrait photo of Bloody Mary, but I got a bunch of colourful crowd shots that I quite like. As before, these ones don't have much focus, but capture a lot of the feel of the evening.
I was really impressed with the set from Pan/Tone (who is apparently an Ontario boy--go home team!). As his set began, R., C. and I all pushed to the front for a better view of things. Things got really packed very quickly, so unfortunately it was hard to dance. Despite that, I did manage to get a one pic and a bit of video:
Thankfully, the video spares me the trouble of describing the set's sound in detail, but I can probably summarize it as less house and more techno, spanning from a minimal-ish sound at the beginning to a noisy, acid-house-y sort of techno later on. Unfortunately, there were some pretty substantial technical problems that brought the set to an early close. I wasn't able to figure out whether the problem was with his laptop, his firewire audio box, or the club's system. Either way, after about 3 different outages and frantic fixes, he gave up and unplugged his laptop. Bloody Mary and Benno Blome threw down some records for a few minutes while Pan/Tone tore down his kit and Misc. put up theirs.
Alas, no pictures or video for this set. I had put my bag down and hidden it under the stage area, but things go so crowded that I couldn't really go back to my bag to retrieve my camera when I wanted to. Also, Misc.'s set was a lot of fun and I sort of forgot to be "documentary" about it.
Misc.'s set followed well from Pan/Tone's, being entirely techno in sound (not a trace of microhouse) and louder/more intense. They tended to use bass kicks that were less punchy and more round, and the middle and high frequency bands tended to be quite dense. They were particularly fond of analog synth-like sounds, it seemed.
Shortly after Benno Blome started, I finally threw in the towel and went home. I was still weak and sore from being so ill the same morning, so it was a wonder that I lasted as long as 4h30. I hunted down R. and C. and made my goodbyes, fought to get my jacket from coat check, and hopped on the bus home.
I was approached by a guy on the bus, asking for a cigarette. His dress, body, and bodily habitus marked him as a "banlieuesard"--a term for the collection of working-class North and West Africans that were brought into France during the post-war period and settled into the regions around Paris. Whereas a lot of racial and class fear in the U.S.A. is often directed towards black and latino bodies in the inner-city, the same kinds of anxieties and prejudices are directed outwards to the suburbs and onto Arab-Berber and West-African bodies here. Anyway, I told him that I didn't have any cigarettes, and when he didn't seem to believe me, I opened my bag to show him that there were none. At this point, he suddenly became very talkative (he was rather drunk) and interested in my welfare. As we both got off the bus near Port des Lilas, he advised me to "cover" myself more. Essentially, he thought that I was being too forthright and open and that I was liable to get mugged or otherwise exploited for it. As we walked toward my building (and his next bus stop), he showed me the lacerations on his legs where he had been beaten by police earlier that night. He didn't seem too angry with them; he was happy they didn't arrest him and let him go home. With that, we arrived at my door and parted ways. I was pretty sure he was heading in the wrong direction, but he insisted that there was another bus to Porte de Bagnolet just around the corner.
So a few days ago I got a pair of tickets to the Salon d'Agriculture, which is this fantastic regional food & produce show in Paris. Essentially, every region of France (and their former colonies) set up booths, where they sell and advertise specialities from their region.
DJ and I made plans to go down that afternoon, arriving there shortly after lunch time. The palais d'expositions at Porte de Versailles is massive, and this show actually took up almost all of the buildings. It was pretty amazing. DJ and I started by stumbling across the cognac booths, and things took a downward spiral from there. From what I can recall, here's a quick list of what we did:
Buy a bunch of fantastic saucisson sec of various flavours from the Auvergne region
Sample some cheese from the Auvergne region, and I bought a half-kilo of the Vieux Cantal
Sample some Corsican salami and buy a small dry sausage (the woman at the stand did things à la corse, weiging the sausage at 12€ and then telling me she'll give it to me for 10€ "because you're you").
Sample some muscadet from the Loire valley region.
Sample some pear cider from the same region
Sample several delicious red wines from the rhône valley regions
Sample some burgundian whites
Buy (and sample) a bag of Normandy butter caramels.
Sample some calvados liqueur and pear apéritif.
Sample some Norman beer and chestnut apéritif.
Sample and buy some vin jaune from the Jura region.
Pee.
Sample some triple beer from the Lorraine region.
Drink some caribbean-island rum (from Guadeloupe, I think).
Have one more round of cognac.
When you consider that every "sample" in the above list was usually a full serving, you can see what sort of state we were in. We would've stayed later, but I had to dash home to do a bunch of room-inspections for the departing students, and I needed some time to sober up.
DJ and I split ways, I did the room inspections, ate half a baguette to sop up the alcohol, and then headed back out with DJ. We first tried to eat at a bar / pizzeria near where I live, but it was pretty much deserted. We headed over to Le bar du Berry Zèbre in Belleville, where Laurent a.k.a. HDProject was supposed to be spinning. However, there was nobody there when we arrived and the bar staff seemed entirely unaware of anything happening that night, so we grabbed a quick drink and moved on.
DJ took me out for a late dinner at Les Trois Marmites, which was walking distance from Belleville. I had an avocado and tuna remoulade for my appetizer, while DJ had an escargot preparation (what was with the escargots, DJ?). I had a huge slab of rump steak seared and jigglingly raw with steak fries and béarnaise sauce, while DJ had a leg of pintade (guineafowl). For dessert, DJ had a fondant chestnut cake, while I had a cup of sorbets. All in all, the meal was delicious, although I would pay for it later (see below).
We stumbled out of the restaurant around 1h00 and headed back to Belleville to take the night bus. On the way, we came across a tearoom named "Al Jazira." I'm sure this has a totally appropriate meaning in Maghrebi Arabic, but I have to admit that we took some amusement in the cognitive collision of tearooms and news channels. Someone should open a "FOX News" hot dog stand in Morocco.
Once I got home, I felt like I had an unusual amount of heartburn, but since I didn't have any pepto-bismol with me, I just drank some water and went to bed. Several times during the night, I woke up with a stomach ache, but at around 6am I was driven out of bed by a wave of nausea that had me heaving my previous meal into the Porcelain Altar of Salmonella. I'm pretty sure it was salmonella, since DJ and I had been eating the same thing all day except for dinner, and my dinner included two different sauces that used raw egg yolks (remoulade and béarnaise). My guess is that they used not-so-fresh unpasteurized eggs. Either way, it was an unpleasant way to spend the morning.
One thing that came to mind as I was clutching the toilet bowl and shaking: we make some pretty "inhuman" sounds when we're retching. I was amazed at my own involuntary ability to make guttural noises that were probably audible two rooms over. If there ever was a vocal sound that broadcasts "I'm not alright," it's got to be this.
Also, it really sucks when you puke so hard that even your nose is burning.
OK, so I haven't actually watched any of the IT Crowd episodes, so I can't be entirely sure that I was "the IT crowd" today, but it seems like a good comparison. You see, 12 brand-new G5 iMacs finally arrived for the computer lab at the UCParis Centre today, so I put in a substantial 8 hours setting up the computers, transferring the default OS image onto them, testing each one, making the final adjustments and changes as necessary, and running all of the cabling through the very neat and streamlined new cabinetry we have in the room.
When it comes to setting up large numbers of computers, it's usually rather inefficient to start each one from scratch, initializing the operating system, registering it, installing all the software you want for your computer lab, and creating the complex system of user profiles, permissions and passwords that are necessary for secure system management. Instead, what most people do is set up one computer well in advance, create a copy of the entire hard disk, and then copy that disk image onto the the hard disks of the new computers, deleting the out-of-the-box system and overwriting it in the process.
The transfer of the original image only takes a little while, but the task is substantially extended by all the little things you need to do afterwards. You need to check for any new updates available for the operating system (Mac OSX in this case), open all of the programs once to allow them to create their preferences lists, add the network printers and test the connections, make little adjustments that you didn't forsee (e.g., changing the paper size in Word's "Normal" template), and so on. Anyway, all of this meant that I didn't leave work until about 8pm.
One of my profs was in town again (the same one that came touring through Paris with her partner a few months ago), this time with her mother in tow. I gave her a call as I was wrapping up work, and we made plans to eat dinner at La Tour de Montlhéry -- Chez Denise. I had heard of this place before on chowhound.com and my boss gave it a glowing recommendation, so I called them and made reservations for 22h00 (the restaurant is open pretty much all night).
Ordering our food was a bit chaotic for a number of reasons: the place was packed an noisy--with a particularly shrill woman seated very close to us; the waiter spoke quickly and mumbled, which made it hard for a group of 3 foreigners; the menu, which was written on a slate board, was organizing in a confusing manner, grouping the seafood main dishes with the appetizers. After a fair bit of confusion and translation, we finally got our orders in. I had an appetizer of raw salmon slices marinated in lime juice and olive oil, my prof had no appetizer, and her mother had the same salmon dish. For our main meals, I had a mutton and white-bean preparation that was very similar to cassoulet, my prof had a braised salmon dish, and her mother had tripe in calvados (ew).
The food was lovely, the portions were HUGE (I mean, ridiculously so) and the wine selection was great. By midnight, we had finished our meal, paid the bill, and stumbled out onto the Paris métro back to our respective abodes.
I don't know if I was the first one to think of this, but I'm pretty damn proud of it. You see, a colleague of mine passed on to me a bottle of concentrated mole sauce, smuggled from the USA. I had three chicken thighs sitting in the freezer that needed to be eaten soon. I thought about the very French mushroom-cream chicken that I often make, and realized that I could mix the concetrated mole with crème fraîche to make something very delicious. Add to this the fact that I still had that cocoa-based pasta I bought a few months ago, and it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.
So I invited DJ over again after work and I made a big pile of mole-cream chicken over cocoa pasta. DJ brought along some fine whiskey and wine (and bread), and we ate like kings. The recipe itself was surprisingly simple. It hardly merits a recipe, but here it is nonetheless. [By the way, I had meant to get a picture of the resulting dish, but I was too hungry and forgot.]
Ingredients
1 jar of Mole (I used a concentrated paste of 125g marked "4 portions")
1 tub of crème fraîche, 500ml
3-4 chicken thighs or breasts
Rotini or penne rigate, enough for 4 people
Preparation
Ideally, you should brown the chicken in its own fat, remove the chicken, and then begin making the rest of this recipe in the same saucepan. However, you can skip this step if you're pressed for time or your using frozen chicken.
Prepare the mole as indicated on the container, but half the liquids. In this case, I used a 1 : 1 ratio of water to concentrate, rather than the 2 : 1 ratio indicated on the bottle.
Heat the water and paste gently and mix vigorously until a smooth sauce forms.
Add crème fraîche and mix together. Increase heat to medium and wait for mixture to begin bubbling.
Add chicken, partially cover, and leave on a low simmer for at least an hour. Stir occasionally to pull up any milk solids sticking to the bottom.
The fat will likely separate from the cream during this process, and this will be even more pronounced if you're using a fatty part of the chicken (e.g., thighs). You can either skim some of the fat (but lose tasty fat!) or whisk it back into the emulsion later.
About 15 mins before the chicken is ready, begin to boil pasta in salted water. Drain and toss with a ladleful of the mole-cream sauce to prevent sticking.
Remove from heat. Remove chicken and place to one side. Whisk cream and oil until it returns to a smooth emulsion.
Serve chicken on a bed of pasta. Ladle sauce overtop.
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