Well, the beginning of the day was...early. I got up much earlier than usual to get myself ready to take the new group of students off to the UCParis center. Things went reasonably well. Everyone made it to the center (eventually) and settled in. After giving them a short tour of the building, I ran off to my office to get settled in. From there on, the rest of the day was spent taking care of IT issues that often come up on the first day of classes (although I'd like to point out that a lot less of them would happen if certain instructors wouldn't request their Chalk websites the morning of the first class meeting).
Sometime during that day, I get an email from DJ saying, effectively, "Let's get out of here and eat." And, thus, I have inaugurated the DJ+LuisEat label for my blog. Between eating out and eating in, we'll soon have enough material to write a cookbook and a restaurant guidebook.
Anyway, DJ took me to this great little bistro west of Montmartre (near métro Rome, on line #2) called Trois-Pièces-Cuisine (trans: "3 rooms plus kitchen"). It's this adorable corner bistro / bar that is (surprise!) arranged into three rooms, with a bar wrapping around the wall between two of the rooms. The third room has essentially been annexed by the largest room, with the dividing wall nowhere to be seen. The walls have ancient wallpaper that may now be retro but was probably once earnest, the chairs and tables seem to be mostly second-hand, and the décor is generally very functional.
As the review in LeFooding.com suggests (see previous link), this place is full of young'uns. As the night progressed, however, things got a bit older, but never losing its core audience of late-high-schoolers. Most of the servers were, as DJ termed it, "pretty young boys," which was certainly true of the guy who served us; he was slim and well-groomed and stylish and just a wee bit fey.
What was also true about him was that he had one dead eye that would never focus on you. This isn't something I would normally find particularly noteworthy, but it was the subtleness of his condition that made it somewhat distracting. It was only after he visited our table 3 times that I figured out why his stare seemed so unsettling. Afterwards, every new visit to the table was an opportunity for me to try to puzzle out whether his eye was lazy, glass or simply non-functional. That much being said, he was a very effective waiter, one eye or two.
Both of us had salads. Or, rather, we had salades, which are dinner-sized portions of fresh greens with piles and piles of toppings. In the process we polished off a bottle of wine, several beers and a coffee. As we were getting ready to leave, our server realized that there had been an error at the cash and another table had paid for our bill and their bill was...well...substantially smaller. So we quietly paid their bill, thanks Bacchus for our luck, and headed to the métro station.
Why is it that I remember nothing from Sunday? Admittedly, part of the problem is that I'm trying to blog about it 4 days later. But still, I feel like I should at least remember what I ate or where I went. I'm pretty sure I didn't stay indoors all day. And I'm pretty sure I was somehow productive. Hmmm.
It's funny, but in the last couple of months, most of my weekends have consisted of a daytime filled with rest, recuperation and clerical work, followed by approximately 6-8 hours of intense clubbing all night. On the other hand, this weekend has kept my daytime hours very very busy, so not surprisingly I've done very little in the way of going out and partying. Although I didn't hit a club this weekend, I nonetheless managed to be quite busy.
In the morning, I headed over to the grocery store nearby and picked up some culinary goodies for later that night. I was going to a colleague's potluck party that evening, so I needed to bring something. I bought another 1 kg bag of vitelotte/purple/blue potatoes and all of the ingredients necessary to make my purple potato salad and my purple mashed potatoes. I busied myself cooking up a storm until 16h00 rolled around, when I had a meeting with the new students.
I gave the students a tour of the building, a short lecture on various rules & regulations about the building, a tour of the neighbourhood and some help buying their metro passes. After that, I headed home and put the finishing touches on the food and headed out to the party.
The party itself went well, although I was one of the only people to bring savoury dishes. As a result, we had about 20 pies and 3 savoury dishes. Oh, and maybe 6 different kinds of cheese. I'm not complaining about it, mind you. Cheese and dessert sounds just fine to me.
Strangely enough, when I went to grab my jacket and head home, someone had called my phone 3 times without leaving a message. Strange, really. I spent the rest of the walk home wondering to myself who had been calling me.
Today was the day that all of the spring quarter students arrived at the residences. Although things went more smoothly than the last few times, it nonetheless ate up my entire day. The building staff had developed a system where they would call me on my cell as they finished checking-in a new batch of students. They would give me their room numbers and then I would go and meet them in their rooms to take care of the various "welcome" rituals. Unlike in past instances, the students arrives at 30 minute intervals all day, which meant that I never had more than 30 minutes of continuous undisturbed time to do my own work.
Nonetheless, the day went well and everybody got settled in. The students had the luck of arriving on a Friday, which meant that we have all weekend to take care of the mandatory tour of the building, neighbourhood, and the purchase of métro passes.
The rest of my day was pretty unexciting. I was planning on going out that evening, but I began to feel pretty crappy toward the end of the day and decided that I needed to take some time off and prepare myself for the coming week (aside from the orientation of the new students, I also have taxes to file, grants to apply for, and 4 visitors coming to see me in 2 weeks).
OK, this was less planned than the last dinner with DJ, and I am proud to have invented a new dish in the process. I call it The Luis, out of pure hubris. When I die, I will live on in recipe form.
I bothered DJ for a dustpan and ended up inviting him up for dinner (which sounds like a hilarious premise for a porno, now that I think about it; "Is that a dustpan in your hand?" [cue porn guitar]). He went out and bought some wine (great wine, by the way DJ!) and bread and milk, and I set about throwing together The Luis (see below). With our apéritifs, we had baby pink radishes with this awesome smoked-salt butter. As DJ can attest, you could smear this butter on cardboard and it would be delicious. It's that good.
After a mountain of salade frisée, we had The Luis, and then seared tuna fillet (finally!). At this point, we were so full we were ready to burst. We skipped the cheese course and the dessert, which is just as well, since I was already later for a date with friends for drinks over at Bastille.
I headed out to meet the same friends that I had seen last Saturday, who had also brought another pair of friends. We had a few rounds of drinks at a bar on rue de Lappe (near Bastille) called Sister May. After a great night of chatting and comparing favourite music bio-flicks, we made plans to meet again on Friday and headed our separate ways home.
The Luis: mashed purple potatoes and green leek soup
Ingredients
The Potatoes
About 500gr of purple / vitelotte / "all blue" potatoes, whole
2 large white or yellow onions, sliced in paper-thin half-rounds.
1/2-cup of butter for potatoes, 2 tbsp. for onions
2-3 cloves of garlic (optional)
splash of sweet vermouth or sherry
1/2-1 cup of milk
1/2-cup of creme fraiche (or sour cream)
The Leek Soup
2 large leeks with the greens still on
1/2-cup of butter
3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed or chopped
One onion, chopped finely
1-2 cup(s) of stock or water
1/2-cup of milk
1/2-cup of crème fraîche (or sour cream)
Preparation
The Potatoes
Rinse potatoes but DO NOT peel them. Without their peels, purple potatoes go grey in water.
Put is saucepan or stock pot, cover with water and boil until tender (easily pierced with a fork)
In the meanwhile, slice onions and put them in saucepan with butter over medium heat. Cover (you can also add sage and/or oregano for flavour here).
When the onions are beginning to brown to the bottom of the pan, deglaze with vermouth and reduce heat.
When potatoes are ready, drain, cut into cubes, and return to pot along with butter. (You can remove the peels if you don't like them, but the results are tastier and more vibrantly purple if you leave them on.)
Mash potatoes roughly with spoon or whisk (or use a ricer if you prefer a smooth mash).
Add 1/2-cup of milk and 1/2-cup of creme fraiche, stir briskly into potatoes. Keep on adding milk until the mixture is creamy but not too thin.
Add onions with pan drippings and mix through
The Leek Soup
Cut up leeks into small chunks and place in pot with butter over medium heat to sweat. Make sure you wash the leeks well! They pick up grit very easily. Also, trim off the ends, but make use of the more mild green ends as well for a better-looking soup.
Chop onions and add. Sautee the entire mixture until reduced and soft.
Add garlic.
When garlic has mellowed, add 1 cup of stock and simmer for 10 minutes on low heat.
Add milk and creme fraiche. Blend with wand mixer or stand mixer until smooth.
Add more stock if too thick.
Plating
In a deep bowl, take purple potato mash and spread in a thick layer around the bottom and sides of the bowl.
Don't worry mom, I'm just kidding. I just like the sound of that title.
Anyway, following the purchase of the AMAZING 2 kilos of oyster and hedgehog mushrooms yesterday, today was definitely a mushroom soup sort of day. The soup was kind of improvised, but I included a recipe at the bottom anyway, since I liked the results. Anyway, after preparing the soup and eating a huge batch of it along with a veritable mountain of salade frisée, I was too full to eat the delicious filet of tuna I had waiting for me in my fridge. So, with heavy heart, I put the tuna off till tomorrow.
Mushroom Soup as Improvised by Luis
Ingredients
an ASSLOAD of mushrooms (in this case, assload = 4 generous handfuls)
lots of butter (about 1/2-cup to start and another 1/4 to finish)
a couple cups of water and/or stock
one onion, sliced (optional but tasty).
salt, pepper and/or other spices (go lightly; mushrooms are already delicious
Preparation
Essentially, you sweat the crap out of the mushrooms, add butter to sautee them in their juices, and then add water/stock and blend.
Chop mushrooms into chunky slices and place into pan over low heat. Cover and leave for about 10 minutes
When the mushrooms have given up most of their liquor, turn up the heat, add the onions and butter, and sautee.
Once the mushrooms have been cooked all the way through and the onions have reduced, add about 1 cup of the stock/water and mix. Then, transfer to a saucepan or stockpot and add the remaining stock/water. Simmer over medium heat for a few minutes, adding any spices you'd like
You see, I went to the market at place des fêtes this morning and tripped across a vendor that was selling beautiful oyster mushrooms at 2€/kilo (insanely cheap) and hedgehog mushrooms for 3€/kilo. For 5€, I had enough mushrooms for days' worth of soups and stir-frys and such. So, of course, I emailed DJ and announced to him that we were having mushrooms that night.
I had already invited him over to eat the Mung Bean Dal (Indian soupy bean preparation) that I was planning to make tonight, so this just added another course to the evening's festivities. I had also picked up a huge pile of beautiful mâche (lamb's lettuce), which we grazed upon like cattle. When the salad greens are as good as they can be here, all you need is a quick wash and a bit of oil or vinaigrette. I can totally see how "salade" here can be a meal substitute.
I pre-soaked and boiled up the mung beans and then left them to simmer while I prepared the curry base. This time around, I tried doing the spice-tempering thing (I had bought a bunch of whole spices at the Indian grocery store that day). In a rather hot pan with a bit of oil, I threw in some whole cumin, lovage and black mustard and toasted them until the seeds began to pop. I think I had the heat on a bit too high, but thankfully none of the seeds came out burnt.
Shortly after that, I added chopped onions and tomatoes, letting them cook down for a bit. Once the tomatoes were beginning to fall apart, I added a tablespoon of garlic and ginger each (crushed and/or chopped). Afterwards, I added a bit of raz el hanout ("head of the table", a spice mix usually used in Moroccan cooking) and then mixed it with the beans. I added some water and let the whole thing boil together for a while.
A bit later, I added nearly 1/2-cup of butter and almost 1-baguette's worth of stale bread (in cubes). The butter helped to make the soup more velvety and the bread thickened the soup quickly and gave it a more rib-sticking consistency. After a few more minutes for everything to come together, I hauled out my handy wand blender and made a purée. It was delish (although I realized afterwards that I hadn't added any salt yet).
But the big event that night was the mushrooms. I enlisted DJ's help to clean and slice about 1/3 of the mushrooms from both batches (i.e. about 300grams of each). I put them all in a dry pan over low heat and covered them until they rendered all of their liquor. Then, I turned up the heat and sautéed them in their own juices, with a bit of margarine to help things along (sorry, I ran out of butter). Near the end, I added a sprinking of flour to thicken things and a handful of finely chopped cilantro. Again, delicious. In retrospect, the juice of 1 lemon would've been a nice way to cut through the creaminess of the dish.
So we ate like kings and stuffed ourselves silly, but we also drank quite a bit. We had cognac as an apéritif (even though it's more a digestif), then a bottle of Blanc-Typé wine from the Jura region (tasted like non-sweet sherry), then a bottle of bordeaux (forget the domaine), and then several additional servings of cognac as a digestif. If it says anything, we started eating around 8pm and DJ didn't leave my apartment until 4am.
I've mentioned poutine on this blog numerous times, I think. If you haven't come across it before (and you're too lazy to click on the link I just gave you), it's traditional junk food / comfort food / haute cuisine from Québec, Canada. Essentially, it's a big plate of fries, sprinkled with fromage beaucronne (cheese curds, very fresh), and hot gravy ("sauce brune"). Gravy melts through the cheese, and then you eat the whole mess and pass out.
A friend of mine confessed to never having tried it before, so I dragged him off to The Moose tonight. He ordered the traditional poutine + montreal smoked meat, and I ordered the "Italian" poutine--just to try something new. It turns out that I'm not thrilled about messing around with the poutine recipe. The substitution of marinara sauce for gravy was rather disappointing, although I'll give them points for the mess of vegetables. Either way, we ate until we were horribly full, drank some beer, and then headed back home. Mission accomplished!
After sleeping in VERY late, I did a fair bit of work and then headed out with DJ for a couple of beers in the early evening. I was planning to attend the Freak n' Chic night, which required me to be there much earlier than usual. As I had mentioned in the post for my last visit, the Freak n Chic sunday night events are designed as a "work-night" club. Essentially, the club starts at 19h30 instead of 0h00, and ends around 1h30 instead of 6h00. That way, you can go out, party, and still be at work Monday morning.
Freak n' Chic: Cabanne, Marc Antona and Dan Ghenacia @ Le Zèbre de Belleville
Here's all three of them: Dan Ghenacia on the left, Cabanne in the middle, and Marc Antona on the right.
So, I arrived at the club around 21h30, which still seemed terribly early. However, the place was already fully packed. There was a lineup of maybe 20 people, but the line wasn't moving at all. After a while, it began to dawn on those of us in the line that they were only letting people in as other people left: the one-in-one-out situation. Argh!
As we waited in line (and as people did their best to jump ahead of each other and cut in line with their friends), it began to rain lightly. Then it began to snow. Then it began to rain heavily with high winds. Then it began to HAIL. During all of this, I was standing in line outside in nothing but a light zip-up sweater. It wasn't until 22h30 that I got to the front of the line.
When I finally got in and realized that Cabanne was spinning (I hadn't taken a close look at the flyer) I felt like the struggle had been worth it. As you might recall, I missed Cabanne last Friday at Batofar. However, Cabanne was only spinning for another 30 minutes, so I did my best to take advantage of the opportunity to dance to the end of his excellent microhouse set. I did manage to get a few pics, at least.
When I wasn't trying to figure out which Amercian comedian he looked like (it was bugging me all night!), I really enjoyed Antona's set. It was minimal but with pretty fat bass, and much more techno-y than the Cabanne set before and Ghenacia's set afterwards. The bar was PACKED when I had gotten into the club at 22h30, and it was still insanely packed now. In fact, up until the moment I left, this place was packed wall-to-wall. Whatever they're up to, they clearly have managed to draw a dedicated crowd.
0h00-1h30: Dan Ghenacia
Ghenacia, who is the resident of this night, spins great tech-house, but I was just too tired and fed-up with being stepped on by tall French people. After about half an hour of trying to dance, I headed back out and caught the last métro train back to my place. Ah well, next time I'll arrive early and stay all night!
Despite how my night ended yesterday, I woke up feeling a fair bit better. I puttered around the apartment, took care of a bit of work, and finally got around to getting my MySpace page up and running. I had delayed "publishing" the MySpace profile until I had at least one bit of music to upload as well, and that part of the project had been lagging behind. I managed to throw together a little track from two audio samples, some MIDI instruments, and a fair bit of audio FX--all of it through Ableton Live. Once I find a decent mp3 hosting site for all of the audio examples, I'll make a short "how I did it" post, explaining how I manipulated a few short recordings of my hand brushing and tapping the body of my laptop into an actual track. For the moment, you can hear the finished track on my MySpace page here.
Working on that track and then uploading it took the larger part of the day, so at 21h00 I found myself getting ready to head out. Although I wasn't due at the Rex that night until 1h30, I had two friends in town that I was going to meet for drinks and possibly clubbing. I picked them up from their neighbourhood and took them down to a bar/café on Place des Vosges that I'm particularly fond of. The food was decent and the beer was fine, but we had one of those especially saucy waiters whose demeanour seemed to waver between acerbic wit and contempt hidden behind humour. We took a little walk through the Marais and ended up in the gay district for another round of drinks. By approximately 1h00, we all headed off in our own directions. I was on a guestlist that expired at 1h30, so I had to make a quick dash to the Rex.
I zipped over to the Rambuteau métro station and waited on the platform. At first, the sign on the platform said "Next Train: 1 minute." After a minute, the number disappeared and the sign was blank. Another minute later, the sign lit up again and said "7 minutes." Well, there was no way I would make it my métro at this point, so I ran up to the surface and hailed a taxi. My hope was that the cost of the taxi ride would be balanced out by the 13€ I would save by getting to the line in time. Despite the fact that the Gods of One-Way Streets were plotting against me, we managed to make it there with about 15 minutes to spare.
I rolled out of the car and got into the guestlist line. There were maybe 20 other people there, so I was optimistic about getting in under the 1h30 deadline. Then, all of a sudden, the speed of the guest line decreased drastically. For every 20 people that went through the cash-only line facing us, only 1 or 2 would go through from the guest line. It was pretty clear what they were up to: when the deadline for the validity of the guestlist passed (1h30), suddenly the guest line started moving and the door man shrugged his shoulders, saying "You're too late, now. You'll have to pay full price."
A few minutes (and 13€) later, I found myself inside, eyeing the line for the coat check. It was an unmitigated mess, and I was wearing a relatively light sweater, so I just kept it on and headed off to the dancefloor. By the time I ran into Fantomette and Nathan, Mlle Caro had pretty much finished her set, which is why I have nothing interesting to say about her set.
As the music paused for a moment and I heard a lot of cheering, I noticed that they were switching from Mlle Caro's vinyl setup to the dual-laptop setup of Kiki and Silversurfer. I parted ways with the Be My Chose crew and headed up to the front of the room to get some pictures and video. After getting a few pictures of the two of them from the front (Kiki is the twinky blond one, while Silversurfer is the swarthy one with the hat), I went around the side of the stage area and took a few pictures of their laptop setup from over their shoulders.
Essentially, both of them had Ableton Live running on their laptops (which were both Dells, I think), each connected to FireWire audio interfaces (which allows the laptops to manage multiple audio and MIDI channels, rather than the built-in "line in" jack), each connected to an outboard midi controller (so that they can control the tracks in Ableton Live using physical knobs and sliders, rather than a mouse pointer) as well as a shared multi-channel mixer (I didn't count the number of channels, but you can see it in the pictures below).
While taking these pictures, I was interested to note a certain division of labor going on. Silversurfer's laptop only had one track playing in Live, which he seemed to rarely touch. On the other hand, Kiki had numerous loops on several tracks running in Live. While Kiki was entirely engrossed in the manipulation of the various elements he had running in Live, Silversurfer spent more time working directly on the mixer, manipulating EQ levels for the channels. A few minutes later, things shifted and Silversurfer started spending more time at his laptop.
I have to admit to being not as excited about their set as I had expected. Based on the individual tracks I had heard from them, I expected something a bit more minimal and glitchy in texture. Instead, while they certainly maintained a formal minimalism (i.e., lots of repetition, slow or infrequent changes), their sound was closer to a noisy, thick-textured, big-room techno set. While this in itself wasn't disappointing (I can definitely enjoy thumping techno), I found the pacing of the set kind of off. I think this is a common risk with live sets rather than vinyl. When you're working with vinyl, you have a set of "finished" tracks (although they're always "finished" with an eye toward being recombined with other tracks) that usually come with their own well-proportioned topography. As long as you line up the next track with a breakdown or an upcoming climax, you can usually be assured a great overall pace at the 5-10 minute level. Outside of that, it's still very much up to the DJ's selection skills to create trajectories and pacing that span the entire set.
Live sets, on the other hand, tend to come out of improvisation with a collection of pre-made materials (loops, samples, etc.). The form is much more open-ended, and it is up to the performer to think about pacing and variations of intensity at the 1-minute level, 5-minute level, 10-minute....pan-set level, all at the same time. As a result, the quality of a live set's pacing rests a great deal on the performer's ability to set and maintain a good large-scale rhythm.
That much being said, I still had a good time and managed to get a few choice bits of video:
I really like MIA's set a lot more. Her selection of tracks were a bit more microhouse and minimal, with an emphasis on complex, crystalline patterns in the high end, and punchy bass. In general, the pacing of her set was better, working up the crowd with "arrivals" and "departures" (see waaayback for what I mean by this) without becoming erratic or boring. She seemed to have a good feel of how long a particular "moment" should last before she moves on to something new.
Hot man-on-man action after the images & video!
Seriously!
During MIA's set (and also a bit during Kiki & Silversurfer's live set), I noticed a group of male friends who were hanging out near the front of the crowd and having a great time. Much like the homosocial behaviour I reported on way back at the Techno Parade (and which I've seen in many other contexts since then), these guys were engaging in forms of sexual play with each other while dancing--until a cute girl walked into their midst. One moment they were all over each other and mimicking same-sex sexual acts, the next moment they all re-oriented themselves toward the hot female in their midst their "divining rods" all pointing in her direction. As soon as she had passed on (and after usually some failed attempts at winning her favour), the boys were back to feeling each other up. While you sometimes see a bit of this play among (presumably) straight guys in North America, you rarely see it at this intensity: they were grinding on each other, crotch-to-butt, rubbing and pinching each other's nipples, licking necks and biting ears. Even when a girl might deign to dance with one of them for a moment, often another guy would dance against him from behind, forming an unexpected female-male-male sandwich (instead of the usual girl-in-the-middle thing). I think what stuck with me the most was how sustained a lot of it was. If, in Chicago or Toronto, your average str8 techno boy wanted to joke around with his male friend, he might approach him and grind on him / smack his ass for a few seconds but then quickly pull away and laugh, creating a certain "corrective" distance. In this case, however, these guys would casually grab their friend's hips and grind on them for minutes on end, without the "Ha Ha! This is funny because we're not gay!!" gesture at the end.
Anyway, I still haven't decided what I think of this, but I wanted to mention it and sort of add it to the "archive" that is this blog...
5h00-6h00: Kiki & Silversurfer Vinyl Set
It took me a few minutes to realize that Kiki & Silversurfer had taken over the DJ booth from MIA. Their vinyl set was better and well-paced, but by then I was tired and ready to head home. Keep in mind that about 24 hours ago I wasn't feeling very well at all. I kept dancing until the subway reopened (5h30) and then headed up to the surface and made my way home. I realized as I was getting on the subway that--aside from a few sips of water stolen from friends--I had not bought anything to drink while inside the Rex. I took a certain satisfaction in knowing that what Rex took from me at the door, I took back from them at the bar (in reduced consumption of alcohol). I know it's an empty satisfaction, but you'll have to allow me this one comfort....
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