OMG I MADE ALIOLI FROM SCRATCH

For realz, yo. There were other amusing things that happened today, but this is by far the most awesome.

Now, I don’t just mean that I made alioli with a hand-blender or something. I made it WITH A MORTAR AND PESTLE. That is how hard-core I am.

So just to review: alioli (or aïoli) is a sort of mayonnaise that is made with a clove of garlic as the basic emulsifier rather than an egg. Originally from the Provençal / Catalonian regions, this recipe was traditionally made by crushing some garlic into a smooth paste and then adding mustard and oil until it takes on a mayonnaise-like texture. Egg yolks are sometimes added to speed up the emulsion, but the “real thing” involves just salt, garlic, oil, with a bit of mustard and a bit of lemon juice.

Here is a more general recipe for the sauce (although I disagree with the author’s use of egg), but here is what I did tonight:

1. Take 2 large cloves of garlic, peel then slice finely and throw into a pestle (in retrospect, one was more than enough)
2. Add salt, a little splash of olive oil, and a half-teaspoon of Dijon mustard.
3. Pound and pound and pound. The garlic should turn into a paste.
4. At a certain point, the olive oil you had added will disappear into the paste. At that point, add just enough oil to cover the paste and start pounding again.
5. As the paste absorbs the oil, repeat the previous step again.
6. When the paste starts getting a bit stiff, add the juice of half a lemon.
7. Pound until the juice is absorbed, and then start again with the oil.
8. Keep going until the paste starts getting stiff. NOTE: It’s very hard to get the sort of “hard” mayonnaise emulsion you get from store-bought mayonnaise, so don’t push the emulsion too far.

Now, I threw the entirety of the mixture over a super-large bowl of mâche greens and called it an appetizer. I should’ve left the alioli to mellow out a bit before eating, as the two cloves of raw garlic were strong enough to make my mouth hurt. I’m a big fan of spicy food, but even I had trouble finishing. Also, I stank of garlic for the rest of the night.

Luis does military drag

Most of my day was pretty uneventful. There were really only two amusing or interesting things to mention.

The first was that I had forgotten about daylight savings time this weekend, so I got to bed an hour early than I needed to and I headed out for work an hour earlier than I needed to. This was actually a good thing, since I spent well over ½ hour looking for a place to park my Vélib bike. All of the stations around my place of work were full—all six of them. In the end, I dragged the bike down three flights of stairs to an underpass roadway called Chevaleret and parked at a Vélib station that is always free (because it’s on a street that is accessible by three flights of stairs).

Anyway, having gotten up an hour early meant that I actually got to work on time instead of nearly 1 hour late. Gah.

In the afternoon after work, I head over to a “coiffure masculine” (the French equivalent of a barber shop) near my place to get my hair cut. I ducked my head in, still drenched after biking home in the rain, and asked if the lone barber had an opening. He told me to sit down while he finished on the guy in the barber’s chair.

I was encouraged to see him work meticulously on the short-cropped hair of the guy before me. Although the guy was balding around the crown, the barber gave him a short and slightly shaped coif (pointed at the middle and the front) which didn’t try to cover the bald spot, but rather made it blend into the rest of the haircut. I don’t have a bald spot (thanks, parents!), but it was a good show of his skills.

Whenever I go to a new hairdresser—especially “masculine” ones—I’m always worried that I will get “Male Haircut #5” or some variation thereof. You know what I mean, the short-cropped, no-nonsense haircut that guys sport when they want to ensure that there is no chance that they are “gay” or a “sissy.” So when I finally sat in the chair and said, “I need this really, really short on the sides and back,” I was braced for disaster. As I always tell myself in these situations: I look pretty decent in a buzz cut.

Well, in the end, I got a jarhead cut. That is, the hairdresser gave me a military-style, somewhat rectangular haircut: buzzed to the quick on the back and sides, and just long enough on top to sit flat. To his credit, it wasn’t your basic jarhead cut, but rather the fine-tuned, shaped version of what a professional stylist would imagine a jarhead cut would look like. There were lots of fine touches, such as buzzing the areas above the temples a bit closer than the rest of the sides and back. I’m not sure if it’s exactly what I wanted, but it looks pretty good. It goes well with my “election beard.”

Oh right, my election beard. I should probably explain. I’ve never been a facial hair person; the last time I lived in Paris, I grudgingly conceded that a bit of scruff made my face a bit leaner. However, I had a moment of brilliance a week ago. During hockey playoff season in Canada, hockey team members as well as many of their fans let their beards grow for the entire time that their team is in the playoffs. When their team is eliminated from the playoffs or finally wins, the shaving of the “playoff beard” is something of a ritual. Anyway, it’s a superstition similar to wearing a team jersey while watching soccer or football.

So here’s my idea: I don’t have an “Obama” team jersey, but I can certainly grow a beard. As it turns out, I’m very good at growing a beard. Only one week after putting down the razor, I already have full coverage of my face. It’s rather itchy and kinda driving me crazy, but if there’s any possibility that it will edge an Obama presidency closer to reality, I’m all over it. I haven’t managed to take photos quite yet, but they are soon to come. I look like some sort of military “bear” type. I just need a few tattoos and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off.

Research Ethics and Vermin

Following this weekend’s trend of lethargy, I didn’t actually leave my apartment today. I slept in, felt sluggish and tired, but then eventually put myself together and spent a few hours working on my Internal Review Boards. The IRBs involve a procedure for vetting the ethics of your research if you work on human subjects. This means, of course, pretty much my entire project needs to be scrutinized by a panel of ethicists.

While noble and necessary, the IRBs at U of C suffer from the same problems that similar processes do everywhere. They are tedious and time-consuming; IRB boards are soothed by details, so they demand to know what you will do to mitigate the damage of every possible eventuality, short of perhaps the apocalypse. The format of the application is geared towards medical and psychological studies; most of the questions asked presume that you’re doing to do something invasive to the person’s body or subject them to distressing situations—and yet I can’t simply say, “Come on, I just want people to tell me their stories!” The IRBs presume a private, quiet, controlled environment for conducting your studies; if you’re going to be speaking to people in noisy clubs where courtship and intoxicant-use are taking place, the burden is on you to explain why it might not be a good idea to be enacting the rituals of formalized written consent. What would you do if someone walked up to you in your place of leisure/play and whipped out a contract? How likely would you be to sign a contract from a guy you just met, when the musical community you belong to has a long history of being vilified in the press and victimized by the state?

Anyway, the process is in no way fun, but I finally just sat myself down and forced myself to get it done. Now my advisor (*ahem*) just needs to sign off on the protocols and I will hopefully get a green light for my work.

Another piece of news: I have a mouse in my apartment.

Actually, this isn’t completely news for me. I knew he was there, but we had an understanding. He’s normally quite considerate. He stays away when I’m around, and when he needs to do his business, he climbs into the bathtub and does it right next to the drain. A quick blast of water from the shower head every morning ensures that I don’t accidentally step in mouse poop. I keep my food in my (thankfully large) fridge or in a hanging basket that can’t be reached “on foot,” so I’m sure that he’s not getting into my food. I presume that he’s hanging around because one of my floormates doesn’t keep his/her kitchen clean. It could always be worse: it could be cockroaches.

However, we had something of a gentleman’s agreement: don’t let me see you. I could tolerate the occasional traces of his travels through my apartment, but if I was forced to see him in the flesh, I would feel compelled to do something about it.

Well, tonight he finally made a fatal miscalculation. He scampered out from under the fridge as I was sitting on my couch, only a few feet away. I don’t know what he was thinking; the lights and the TV were on in the apartment. Anyway, he dashed out and, reflexively, I jumped up and chased him back into his hiding place.

In the moment afterwards, I actually felt a sort of sad resignation. I don’t much like to kill things gratuitously, but I was aware that his appearance tonight meant that I would be shopping for mousetraps tomorrow.

Batofar has a canteen?

Something about getting up at 5h00 yesterday really knocked the wind out of me, and I wasn’t even sure that I was going to go out tonight. I spent the majority of the day taking care of some work, looking up my teaching materials for my English class next week, and catching up on blogging. By about 19h00, a Canadian friend of mine called to see if I was interested in going out for and apéro (pre-dinner drinks). In the end, she ate an early dinner, so we turned the date into post-dinner drinks.

We started off at a café near my place called L’Autre Café, where we were seated in the cheap seats (since we weren’t eating). After a couple of “pots” (half-litres) of wine, I got a text message from Fantômette, who was going to be spinning at the “cantine” of Batofar (i.e., the top deck, rather than the club in the hull below). It was close to where my friend lives, so we decided to head out together and check it out.

Up until the last minute, I was still unsure about whether I was really going to go out at all. I was feeling lethargic and I was having trouble mustering the enthusiasm to dance until 6h00 the next day. Nonetheless, I was glad I finally went over to Batofar to see Fantô, as a large part of the “Frenchy Krew” was there was well, so I was able to chat with everyone in a context that was more conducive to conversation than a full-on nightclub.

Mind you, the volume was still set pretty high in that little dancefloor. The “cantine” was the deck level of the boat, including a small covered area, which was maybe 30m2 in total. Although the feel of the space was more bar than club, the drink prices were emphatically club-like (i.e., 10€ for a basic mixed drink). Fieldwork is an expensive enterprise in Paris, I tell you.

Anyway, I got to see Fantô spin for a while, then hung out with the whole group and introduced them to my Canadian friend. By about 2h00, I was feeling tired and kinda done for the evening. There was a Freak’n’Chic party going on at the Rex, but the idea of heading all the way over there and waiting in line just to see a set of DJs I’ve seen several times before just wasn’t very enticing.

My friend and I were going to start heading back home together, but she disappeared as I was making my goodbyes and I couldn’t find her. After making a few attempts to call her, I gave up and headed home on my own. I discovered later that she had made some other friends while waiting for me to leave and so she had gone back into the club and we had somehow missed each other. Ah well, at least she got home safe!

Anyway, I hopped on a Vélib bike and headed home, which was a welcome bit of exercise after a day spent mostly sitting down in front of my computer.

Valley of the Loire...and Pizza Hut

Today, I got up at 5h00. Yes, that’s right. 5am. 5 in the morning.

I was to work as a chaperone for the UofC trip to the Loire valley today. The itinerary was for a day-trip to Blois and Chambord or, to be more precise, to the castles located at both of these towns in the Loire valley. I took my camera, with a freshly-recharged battery, and then totally forgot to take pictures. It’s always a bit stressful when you’re in charge of a group, so I was never really in the mind to whip out my camera and snap pics.

So, no photo evidence of today’s trip. Also, I’m sticking to my policy of not blogging in detail about “work,” so all I’ll say about the trip was that the castles were lovely, but I really don’t enjoy being a chaperone for a tour group.

We got home at about 19h00 and I had plans to go out, but I was just too tired from being on the run for more than 12 hours. So called around and cancelled my plans, and then ordered some pizza. Yes, I ordered pizza delivery in Paris. And just to make it completely ironic, I actually ordered from Pizza Hut.

Actually, the Pizza Hut grub here in France is better than what you would get in the US. They use a blend of French and Swiss cheeses, so the pizza is much more fragrant than the “cheez” mix you usually get on pizzas in the states. The dough was a bit overly wet, and the “stuffed crust” was horribly disappointing, but the toppings were tasty and the whole thing was quite edible. The mozzarella breadsticks, though, were kinda “meh.”

Jeff Koons at Versailles

So I had today off, because I was going to be working as a chaperone for a group of UofC students the next day. I decided, then, to head off to Versailles to finally see the Jeff Koons exhibit there. It’s been pretty controversial, since there are those who believe that putting Jeff Koons’s glossy, hyper-expensive, massive-scale pop-art in the context of Versailles’s pearlescent, extravagant, monumental palace sullies French cultural heritage. I say, “Yes, and?”

Anyway, it’s the kind of exhibit that enraptures or infuriates people, and either way everyone felt compelled to take many, many photos of it. I joined in the fun myself, snapping pictures until my camera ran out of juice. I was pretty salty about forgetting to re-charge the battery; the battery is so long-lasting, I forget that I need to recharge it and every once in a while I find myself out at an event with a useless camera. Grr. Anyway, I’m determined to go back one more time with a fully functioning camera. In the meanwhile, here’s some of the pictures I took today. You can find all of them, with commentary, on my Facebook album [LINK] (yes, I’m on Facebook now; don’t rub it in).

By the way, if you ever want to visit Versailles, go on a weekday during the fall. It was wonderfully under-populated by tourists. Sure, there were still tourists everywhere you looked, but I didn’t have to wait in line to buy tickets or get into the building.

Dissertation Jitters

So, some dissertation-related news: I’ve got a new set of deadlines. The UofC centre has a doctoral seminar running over here, and I volunteered to present a chapter to the group on the 4th of December, which means that I really need to have something ready by the beginning of that month. So, in other words, I have one month to squeeze out a chapter. Let’s see how that goes.

Also, there’s a dissertation-year fellowship (Mellon/ACLS) that has a deadline on November 12, and the application instructions demand a chapter that is neither your introduction nor your conclusion chapter. So, in fact, I’m going to make a mad dash to have at least a reasonable draft of my chapter for November 12…precisely 3 weeks away.

To add to the tension, I went to the first meeting of the seminar today and came to the conclusion that this group is going to HATE my work. There is one anthropologist, who defended her thesis proposal today, and a whole slew of literature (and some philosophy and history) people. Now, back in Chicago I work in a reading group that has a very mixed (and mostly literature) disciplinary demographic and we manage to talk to each other, but this seminar has a very different tone. This woman’s proposal was, like most anthropology proposals, very tentative about defining “common sense” terms like “belief” and “faith” (she’s working on “secular Catholicism” in modern France), since those sorts of concepts are supposed to be derived from the fieldwork (i.e., interviews, observations) that she is about to do. In contrast, archive-based Humanities proposals tend to want all the theory worked out in advance, because this will structure how the project will proceed, what will be excluded, how texts will be interpreted.

In other words, most of the seminar members pounced on the fuzzy definitions and open-ended concepts and wouldn’t let go. Part of this was also due to an ignorance of disciplinary history, though; I’m guessing that most of these other scholars weren’t aware of anthropology’s “Crisis of Representation” in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and the effect it had on anthropologists’ views of their own theory-making. Most scholars in ethnographically-based study are now hyper-aware and self-conscious about how their own terms and concepts risk distorting the results they gain from those they consult with; for example, a North-American notion of secularism might not be the same as the French one, and presuming as much may cause you to misinterpret things and to come to erroneous conclusions.

So, anyway, I’m expecting to show up in December with my soft, weak, vague notions of intimacy, publics, solidarity, affect and so on, and to be savaged. I’m certainly ready for it—one thing UofC teaches you is how to defend your ideas against ruthless critique—but I’m not looking forward to it.

Meh.

Well, not much to report for today, really. I finally finished dealing with that student laptop with the persistent worm. In the end, I backed up her important documents and then wiped the disk and put in a completely new installation of the operating system (Windows XP, not Vista, thank you).

It was raining cats and dogs today, and so I arrived at my English class soaking wet. With all the dignity of a wet cat, I nonetheless pushed through with my class. After that, I headed home, ate a huge plate of leftovers, and did a bit of blogging. Then, sweet, sweet sleep.

Enervé, Enervated

[NOTE: enervé is a “false friend” of the English term, “enervated.” enervé means “frustrated, upset.”]

Although the rest of the day was relatively innocuous, the start of my day was, well, something else.

I left my apartment, a bit behind schedule, and walked over to the nearest Vélib station. All the bikes were taken or broken or, in one case, blocked (i.e., the light on the bike lock was red instead of green). Dammit.

Well, there are other Vélib kiosks around here. I walked over to one of the kiosks on the larger boulevard nearby, and all the bikes were taken or damaged. Fuck.

I walked over to another kiosk a bit further down the boulevard and found that there was one lone bike that was both in good condition and not locked. I put my Navigo pass on the bike lock and it beeped red. What the fuck?

I went over to the terminal at the center of the bike stand and pressed my card to the card-reader. It tells me that I already have a bike out. Fuck.

Something must’ve happened when I returned home from the Rex Saturday night / Sunday morning by Vélib. The rental rate scheme of Vélib was designed to encourage short trips, which means that the rate increases the longer you have the bike out. At more than 24 hours, I can only imagine how much money is currently sitting on my card as a balance. Well, it’s time to make a phone call, as this will only get more expensive the longer I wait. I called the help number marked on the terminal and navigated my way through the phone tree to a live operator. I started walking back toward the Parmentier métro station as I waited for the operator to answer.

Just as I heard the operator come on the line, I hear a loud but hollow thud, scrape and crunch of plastic tumbling and cracking. I thought maybe someone had tipped over their recycling bin as they took it out onto the street. As I turned around, I saw a small car completing its turn to the left, some movement just behind it toward the rear of the car, and a motorcycle helmet, empty, sailing over the top of the car. Holy shit.

As I came around the other side of the car, I saw a dent in the rear drivers-side door panel, a motorbike on its side, and a woman, looking a bit dazed. She seemed, at first, to be ready to get up and brush herself off, as she started to lift herself off the ground and the other driver got out of his car and approached her. But, a second later, her eyes widened, she looked down, clutched her left shin where her black stocking had been torn, and started to scream. Oh no.

She was quickly lost from my view as other witnesses gathered around to tend to her and pull out cell phones. I suddenly remembered that I also had a phone to my ear and there was a feminine voice making confused noises. I ducked around a corner to get away from the woman’s screams and the noise of cars honking as traffic backed up. There were already people helping her, people calling emergency services and at least two dozen witnesses, so my presence wasn’t likely to be needed or helpful; but I still felt bad about walking away and continuing with my business. Regardless of how useless I might be in the situation, I felt some responsibility to just be there and somehow validate, reflect or relay the frightening impact of the moment. I was supposed to stay in the scene, even if I was of no other use.

With all this running through my mind, I tried to articulate my problem with bike rental in French. My veneer of fluency was gone. I spoke in short, telegraphic sentences; fragments that didn’t connect well. I forgot proper technical terms and found myself substituting and misusing more common words instead. I made enough sense for the woman to understand my problem. She seemed to know what to do, as she started to ask me when I had last rented a bike, where I dropped it off, and so on. The details were suddenly jumbled in my head and, as the screams echoing around the corner began to fade, I had to close my eyes and stop walking to get everything straight.

“At which station did you re-attach your bike? What station number?” I didn’t know the number, so I gave her the intersection of streets and the neighborhood. No good, she said, there were too many stations in that area and it would take her forever to find the right one manually. Well, I wasn’t far from the station in question, so I told her I would run over there and check the number myself.

As I ran past the scene of the crash, the woman was sitting up, head down, leaning silently against the driver of the car who had his arms around her while a cluster of people paced nervously with cellphones to their ears.

I got to the bike station, read off the number, and waited for the woman to tell me what to do. She asked me to guess the precise number of the lock I used to re-attach the bike and, after a bit of intense memory work, I gave her a range of 4 or 5 locks. As it turns out, that “blocked” bike I had seen at the beginning of my day was the same bike I had used and returned Sunday morning. I could quite figure out why, but the bike wasn’t properly registered in the system as “returned.” The woman tells me that I there will be a 35€ charge that will eventually be reimbursed from my account, but in the meanwhile I can’t use my card for 48 hours. Well, alright.

This should’ve been the moment where I throw my hands in the air and curse loudly (which I can do with great fluency in French) about how nothing is going right for me today. What I had just witnessed a minute earlier, however, put things into perspective and effectively cut off my mounting frustration. I went to the bike terminal again and bought a temporary 1-day pass, which doesn’t need to use my transit card.

As I biked past the scene of the crash one more time, there was an eerie silence as the rush-hour drivers silenced their honking at the sight of an ambulance. She was being lifted into the vehicle on a stretcher as I crossed the street and dipped into the bike lanes.

Wine cures all ills, except cirrosis of the liver

Well, considering that I had kept myself awake until 6am rather than the much earlier night I had intended, I was a bit of a wreck today. I slept in, then eventually got up and finished washing the last few dishes that were kicking around. I stared at the spotty floor of my kitchen and bathroom and promised myself that I would clean it very, very soon—but not right now.

I treated myself to a few episodes of the Simpsons and Family Guy (thanks to the help WatchSimpsonsOnline and GizzoD!, respectively), scavenged some more leftovers, and set about finishing my blogging of Friday’s events and some of Saturday.

I had a whole bottle of rosé wine in the fridge, which I opened up to drink with dinner. As I watched the news of Colin Powell endorsing Obama repeat over and over on the Anglophone news networks, I drank my way through the entire bottle and fell soundly asleep.