Shopping! [girlish squeal]

Today I decided to go shopping, even though I didn’t really have much money to buy stuff with. I just wanted to see the insanity that is Xmas shopping in Paris. To maximize the craziness, I decided to go to places where the shopping would be at its maddest and also most glamorous. I his rue Saint-Honoré (one of the poshest shopping streets in Paris), and then headed up through Place Vendôme (where all of the jewelers have their flagship stores), and then up into Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. The day was interesting and at times vexing, but here are the highlights.

• At the very concept-y store, Colette, you can’t actually carry your purchase to the counter. If you want to buy a shirt but you also want to keep on shopping, you have to leave the shirt with the Person In Charge Of Shirts, and then when you’re ready to make your purchases you have to tell the person at the counter that you had a shirt put aside for you. Now, I’ve done enough time in retail (*shudder* Urban Outfitters for 5 years) to know that most purchase decisions are impulsive and fragile, and every obstacle you put in the way of a purchase encourages the shopper to actually think about their purchase. So, by the time I had finished wandering around the store, I had come to the conclusion that I didn’t need a 55€ t-shirt, and left it there. If he had let me take the t-shirt with me and hold it as I continued shopping, I don’t doubt that I would bought it (and probably had buyer’s remorse afterwards).
• As I passed place Vendôme and past the main Cartier store (flush with guards at the door and unbelievable jewels in the windows), I come across the unbelievable: Tati Or. You see, TATI is a clothing / housewares / whatever chain that is probably the closest thing France has to WalMart. It mostly specializes in dirt-cheap knockoffs and tends to flourish in poor immigrant / minority neighborhoods. So TATI has somehow managed to afford a small shop on this most expensive of streets to open their own hard-discount jewelry store. I looked through the windows and was pretty impressed with their business model: not so much fake jewelry as simple, plain designs with almost-pure precious metals and semi-precious stones. For example, I saw a flat-link 975/1000 silver chain for 49€. Next to Cartier, this seemed like quite the bargain. Anyway, I just loved the idea of TATI opening a jewelry store in the posh-est area of town.
• Célio [Warning: loud webpage] suddenly has stuff I like. In the past, I’ve always seen Célio as a more European version of the Gap—which is to say, a rather monotonous wardrobe for self-effacing privilege / aspiring underprivilege. I don’t think that’s changed much, but at least this season Célio has discovered color. In particular, they’re all about the purple, violet, cerise and pink. These are all colors I can get behind. And the prices are pretty damn good. Woven shirts for 23€ - 30€ is pretty hard to beat on the upper-end of the chain-store scale. I didn’t buy anything today, partially because I got sick of waiting for the group of 4 saleswomen clustered around the cash register to stop talking and help me find sizes. Maybe I’ll try again during the week.
• This may not come as a surprise to those of you who know me, but it hit me while I was wandering through Printemps: Polo Ralph Lauren is my anti-style. Whatever that label does I am pretty much sure to detest. Go figure.
• I bought scarves! At Galeries Lafayette, I picked up a bubblegum-pink cashmere scarf and another wool-acrylic scarf that is dark brown with a series of thin, green-red-orange stripes along one side. It wasn’t the most luxurious shopping spree, but it still gave me a bit of retail therapy. Mmm, the warm glow of consumerism.
• The famous vitrines are in place and it’s chaos. Both Printemps and Galeries Lafayette have elaborate, shiny, moving displays in all of their shop windows. As is the tradition here in Paris, the displays are mostly directed toward children, and so the scene outside these stores are almost crazier than inside, with parents pressing their children against the windows.

Oysterrific!

Well, as I’ve been unraveling myself from my chapter-writing, I’ll admit that I’ve been slacking off on my blogging. I earned it, dammit!

Anyway, my day was mostly pretty uneventful and kinda lame, except for my trip to the market this morning. I was walking through my neighborhood market, buying my usual veggies and fruits and so on, when I came across the oyster stand. It’s been oyster season for the past few weeks, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid the oyster stand, since I was sure that I couldn’t afford the delicacy.

Today, I actually took a good look at the prices and had a shock: you can get a dozen smallish oysters for 2€!! Even more excitingly, I bought a baker’s dozen of Fines de Claires No. 2 for 8€!!!!1!one! These are the third-largest class of oysters you can get (after No. 1 and No. 0), of the highest-price variety of oysters in the world (Bélon oysters). In a restaurant here in Paris, 12 of these oysters would easily cost 4 times as much.

So I bought a dozen (and got an extra oyster for free) and headed home, ready to fill myself with oyster-y goodness. It took a while to re-learn how to shuck an oyster, but I eventually got the hang of it and pulled all of them apart. I was a smart boy and did all of the shucking over a bowl, so any of the liquid that I lost in the process was saved for making an oyster-juice-based Bloody Caesar and the like. In fact, the oyster liquor was really useful as a sort of salty broth for deglazing pans; I used most of it that night when I was sautéing a pile of winter vegetables. Mmm.

I'm back!

Yay! Well, it's been a few days since I've posted to my blog, so let's catch up, bulleted-list-style:

• I finished writing my chapter last Saturday, after spending the entire day at the BnF. Notably, it was done TWO DAYS before the deadline.
• I treated myself to a take-out dinner at the Indian-Pakistani restaurant near my place, New Ganga. I asked for the vindaloo to be super-hot and they actually delivered. Mmm.
• I immediately had the post-writing reaction where you are convinced that what you just created is total shite.
• I waited until the next day, when I was less repulsed by my own work, and did some editing. I made surprisingly few changes.
• Saturday night, I went out to the Rex to celebrate and to hang out with friends. I had the best intentions to hang out all night and go to the afterparty and all that, but my contact lenses freaked out on me around 5h30 and I had to go home.
• Sunday dinner: roasted vegetables and quinoa. Delicious!
• Monday, I decided to treat myself to a big home-made dinner. I discovered this excellent recipe for Pork Tenderloin in Orange and Rosemary sauce (from the awesome french foodie blog, Chocolate & Zucchini), which I prepared along with some roasted root vegetables and this excellent wine from the Terre des Chardons vinyard, which had this really strong note of olives and a buttery consistency ("Le Marginal", 2007).
• On Wednesday, I went to a friend's place for an apéro / party to celebrate the completion of her schooling. She's off to become an adult, now! When will become a gainfully-employed adult, you ask? Shaddup.

No text, just music, Part 6

"Face Control" by Danton Eeprom

I'm suprised that I did think of posting this one earlier. It's not exactly a current hit, but this track was doing very well over the summer in Berlin. It's by a French producer called Danton Eeprom, who has been blowing up over in Europe during the past year and then wowed everyone at Mutek in Montréal last June (I still haven't blogged about that weekend...sigh). His style follows in Ricardo Villalobos's footsteps in a sense--in the sense that he likes to have at least one slow-moving, echoey, atmospheric element that floats over all of the other rhythmic activity. On the other hand, his beats are much more trancey and spaced-out than Villalobos's beats, which tend to be really punchy. I remember posting a few weeks ago about standing in line and hearing someone behind me talking about how Villalobos's music sorta overwhelmed her emotionally in a way that was sometimes rather ambivalent or confusing. Over the summer, a friend of mine played me this Danton Eeprom track, pointed to the perpetually-rising synth line that starts around the 4-minute mark, and said, "It just gets into your head! If this sort of thing hit me in the right way, in the right situation, I might just lose my mind." So listen from about 4:00 into the track and let the sound spin for a while and see what you think about it. There is something hypnotic about it, I'll admit.

In fact, here's one of my favorite Villalobos tracks, just so that the comparison is complete. Note the lovely video.

"Dexter" by Ricardo Villalobos

The corresponding moment where the "atmospheric" element enters in this track is around the 2:39 mark.

No text, just music, Part 5

Today I got a fair bit of work done (for which I am rather proud, considering I only had about 4 hours after work to review a bunch of Levinas texts and organize my thoughts). After that, I went out with a friend from work for drinks, then dinner, then more drinks. Good times were had, but I stumbled home rather...um...non-productive. I slept well, though.

"Requiem of a Dream" by Johnny D

Woo! I managed to get Beatport to create an embeddable player. If I can manage to duplicate this feat, I might go back an insert a player for the track I posted on Tuesday, which didn't have anything on iMeem.

Anyway, this track is rather interesting, from a perspective of affect / emotion. On the one hand, it has a stream of clicks that have the same upbeat, swing effect as a "hi-hat ride" might have for dance-band/jazz drummers. On the other hand, you've got a string quartet playing a series of slowly-shifting chords that approximate the orchestral score for the gut-wrenching film, Requiem for a Dream. As it turns out, the main title track from the soundtrack, "Lux Aeterna," has had its own history of re-use.

So I'm fascinated by this mixture of depressive affect, serious contemplation and "party time!" music. It works as a minimal techno track, although I haven't seen it deployed on a dancefloor yet. I wonder what this does to the mood of a club. It's been listed as one of the top 50 listed tracks of October on Resident Advisor, so it's obviously working for some people...

No text, just music, Part 4

The chapter-writing continues, so the music posts continue as well.

"Ratman (Hugo Remix)" by Minimono

So I love resonant bass on this one (starting around 0:31 and continuing from there); the bass drums are pitched very low on this one, so you need to listen to this through good earphones or a set of speakers with good woofers, because otherwise you'll be wondering what all the fuss is about. I also am somewhat fascinated with the insertion of crowd noises / conversation (around 1:31 the first time, then passim), which I think was the addition of the remixer, as I can't find it in the original. The other remixes and the original mix are also pretty good and can be found here, on Beatport.com

P.S. Tonight was also the night that the Mumbai terror attacks began, so I was up until 3 or 4 in the morning, gripped by the mixture of hysteria and help on the #mumbai Twitter stream. If you are concerned about people you know who are in Mumbai, you can go to the Mumbai Help blog to see a list of the deceased, injured and rescued. They also posted the help phone lines for some of the hotels. Also, take a look at the comment thread in the top post, entitled "May We Help?" if you want to try and help out; people will post requests to relay messages, call numbers, type up the names of the dead, etc.

No text, just music, Part 3

Alas, this next track hasn't been posted on iMeem, so I had no handy player to embed in here. You'll just have to follow the link below to preview it on Beatport.com.

"Lucky Drawls" by Matt Nordstrom

Listen here on Beatport.com; both the original and the remixed version are good. I'm always impressed by Mark Broom's remixes and then disappointed by his DJ sets.

UPDATE: I managed to get BeatportPlayer to work! Here's the release in embedded form:

No text, just music, Part 2

The non-writing continues!

"Bell Clap Dance (Slam Paragraph Remix)" by Radio Slave

Sometimes this guy puts out amazing tracks, sometimes less so. But this was is pretty great, and the remix that Slam does for this track distills it down to a bubbling, churning sort of minimal froth similar to the SIS track I posted here a couple of months ago.

No text, just music, Part 1

Hello hello. I'm going into chapter-writing hiding, so I'm not going to be posting much to my blog. On the other hand, I feel bad not posting something, so I've decided to play the musical curator and post links to tracks that I've been enjoying with some minimal review/description. In general, I'm culling these from recent DJ charts and published playlists, so that what you'll be hearing here is what I've been hearing in clubs in Berlin and Paris these last few weeks.

So, without further ado, the first installment:

"Radar" by Stimming & H.O.S.H.

Those of you who have been reading my blog over the summer and fall already know how much I love Stimming's work. If this boy gets any better, I'll be asking him to marry me. Anyway, this is another track that was featured in his live sets, along with the ever-popular "Una Pena" and "Safari." Be sure to listen to just past the 5-minute point, where a long, siren-like build-up makes this sudden u-turn into mellow electric organ chords. It somehow works, and I can personally attest that it makes for a great climax on the dancefloor. These chords, pumped through a really powerful soundsystem, can have a really tactile "wash" effect. Anyway, great track.

Saturday Night Respite

OK, this will probably be my last substantial post for the next week or so, as I put my head down and focus on writing my first dissertation chapter. I've been thinking about perhaps posting portions of the chapter as I work on it, but I've ultimately decided against it, since the writing style is substantially different from what I do on this blog. Those who are in contact with me can certainly ask for a copy of the chapter once it's completed, though.

Anyway, I spent most of today in the BnF again, clocking in at 10h00 and staying until 20h00. Yes, that's 10 hours in a library. It wasn't very pleasant. On the upside, I wrote about 25 pages worth of my chapter and I'm about halfway through, so that's a good thing. The downside is that the first half of my chapter was mostly a re-work of my proposal section on "intimacy" as a concept, so there wasn't as much new prose to be written. For the upcoming half of the chapter, however, I have to write entirely new stuff on "touch" and so on. I've done a fair bit of reading on it already, so the rest of this coming week is all about writing.

After my endless day in the library, I headed home and got ready for my night out. There was a party going on at Le Rex including Sven VT (from Zander.VT) and Pantha du Prince, and I had a friend in town from Berlin, so plans were made. I managed to get on the "regular" guestlist for the Rex (thanks Molly!), which meant that we didn't have to rush to the club to get in before 1h00 and stand in line for ages. My plan was to arrive around 2h00, after the Com2Daddy guestlist had closed. So I grabbed a bit of food and took a moment to relax and watch some TV.

By the time 1h00 had rolled around, my Berlin friend still hadn't called, so I gave her a quick ring to see what was up. As it turned out, she had fallen asleep and she was exhausted from a week of working and going out back-to-back. With her apologies, she backed out of going out and I got ready to head over to the Rex. The upside of my friend cancelling was that I was able to just take a Vélib bike over to the Rex. However, I made the mistake of not bringing my gloves so that I wouldn't have to try to check them at the coat-check, but that meant that my hands nearly froze off on the way to the club. Lesson learned.

SvenVT, Pantha du Prince and Chloé @ Le RexClub

???-3h30: Chloé

I took a bit longer than expected and arrived at the club around 2h30. By then, the guestlist line was pretty much non-existent while the cash lineup ran almost to the end of the block. I know that it's totally dirty-elitist to say this, but there's an undeniable pleasure in walking past a huge lineup of people and saying "Hi, I'm on the list" and getting right in. It may be embedded in some communitarian guilt, but there's pleasure there nonetheless.

On the other hand, there's no "guestlist" for the coat check, so I spent nearly 30 minutes waiting to check my coat. By this time of night, they usually have a second coat check open to manage the volume of people, but for some reason they hadn't opened the second one yet (and they didn't for the rest of the night).

Anyway, I only caught maybe the last 15 minutes or so of Chloé set, but what I heard was quite good. I've had rather uneven experiences with Chloé; sometimes her sets have been fantastic, sometimes they've been profoundly disappointing. Notably, though, her vinyl sets are usually consistently good; it's her "live" sets that are unpredictable.

3h30-4h30: Pantha du Prince

I ran into a couple of friends just as Pantha du Prince was starting, and it turned out that there was a big group of them partying tonight, so I suddenly found myself in the company of about 10 people. As much as I'm interested and fascinated by the anonymous and casual aspects of crowd intimacy, I can't deny that it's really nice to have a community of friends to accompany you through a night.

Pantha du Prince's set had a rocky start and then eventually got better. The first half of the set fluctuated in a disorienting way between high-intensity and low-intensity sections; although it was a "live" set, it was clear that he was just linking together his own tracks; the "seams" between the tracks showed in the awkward transitions and in the sharp contrasts of intensity and texture. The second half of his set was much better, though, with smoother transitions, a more congruent and even sequencing of tracks, and a discernable contour to the whole thing.

4h30-6h00: SvenVT from Zander.VT

It seems that I've become so attuned to the sound coming out of Berlin right now that I can identify a Berlin-based DJ from a distance. I knew that Zander.VT was a Berlin-based duo, so this was no major feat of identification, but from the moment he put his first record on, I was thinking of Berlin and all the "local" DJs I had seen there this summer. Anyway, the set was great. His overall sound was that very Berlinesque mix of minimal techno and house, with heavy bass-drum patterns, sometimes melodic basslines, and light, agile high-frequency patterns.

Anyway, around 5h30 I was tired and feeling ready to head home, so I made my goodbyes and started heading out. When I got to the coat check, I found a large group fo people standing around, but none of them seemed to be waiting for the coat check. I pressed past them and got to the short stairway that leads down to the coat check, and found the way blocked by a bouncer, who was speaking intensely into a walkie-talkie. Puzzled, I turned around and looked behind me, up the stairwell the leads to the main entrance of the club. There was a group of men in police uniforms on the first landing, there was a bouncer blocking the way up that stairwell, and there was another bouncer telling the crowd I had just passed to clear the area. I wasn't quite sure what was going on, but it didn't look like fun. Was it a fight? An overdose? A robbery? Why would they close the coat check as well as the exit?

Just as I was pondering that, the bouncer in front of the coat check got a message over the radio and stepped aside, letting me and a few other people claim their coats. When I headed out of the coat check and toward the exit, the bouncer there told us to cross through the entire club, pass the smoker's area, and exit the club by the fire escape. Goodness.

At the fire exit in the smoking room, I saw an employee holding the door that I had briefly gotten to know during the Techno Parade, so I asked him what was going on. All he said was, "A big, big problem," and then waved me through the door.

As I headed out the fire exit and around the block to the subway entrance, I saw an ambulance parked outside the club, as well as a police van that was being filled with clubgoers. They were going quietly and they didn't appear to be handcuffed, so I was guessing that the police van was giving them a ride somewhere. I still haven't figured out exactly what happened, but my guess is that there was a medical emergency of some sort and the police were transporting the companions of the distressed person over to the hospital where s/he had been sent. If I hear anything else, I'll post an update here.

So, on that rather troubling note, I headed home and finally got me some sleep.