Do not. Ever. Drink. This. Beer.
You cannot stomach this beer. You can't. No, don't try, just please trust me, for your own sake. Look, somewhere right now there's an impressionable teenager performing some act of ritual idiocy: maybe eating an entire sleeve of Saltines or forcing a mound of nutmeg up his nostrils. Granted, what he's doing is stupid, but at least at the same time it's slightly courageous, even funny. His pain and discomfort make it difficult for him to appreciate his friend's laughter but at least they're laughing. On the other hand there is nothing funny about this beer, this confused swill the color of dead roses. Drinking this beer tastes the way throwing up sounds. As you start to taste it you can literally hear yourself retching, its transcendent awfulness giving it the power to nauseate across several senses simultaneously. I especially like the packaging that spells out the contents in not one but five languages, so you can be sure no matter where you are that your suffering was no accident. The bartender didn't bring you putrefied donkey sweat or some other local delicacy by mistake, he did in fact try to bring you a beer. As for why that beer tastes like rotten apples, or why the sale of more than a pint isn't a capital offense I cannot say. I can only offer this warning: this is not a beer. This is woe.
Today I did not climb a tree but instead went to Montreuil. No, I am not a mentally dislocated chimp who thinks that tree climbing and subway riding are somehow equivalent. I have been unable to climb any trees because a) this city doesn't have any and b) it will not stop raining. Maybe once the sun comes out I'll wander down to Jardin de Luxembourg and find a nice elm to scale or something, but for now this blog is staying grounded. Actually between working all day at IRCAM and making my way out to the banlieu I'm not sure I would have had any time to climb anyway. Montreuil isn't exactly far but it's not exactly near either. The wonderful magic of Paris is that unlike New York or San Francisco, cities with very firm geological boundaries, Paris simply extends forever in every direction. Sitting on a big, flat plain means that adding one metro stop and a few houses will always be easier than doing any actual urban development. In the center of the city this is actually pretty great; no tall buildings means that lying on the grass feels like being literally inside the sky. On the other hand, it means that interesting things to do can be pretty far away from each other and that you can lose a good part of the day hopping from metro to metro.
I should just mention at this point that I went out to Montreuil to meet Manuel, a fellow Cycling '74 emploi whose house I'll be renting for the next month or so. His house does not look something like this. These are photographs of his house, so his house looks exactly like this:
Anyway, I had a festival of a time relaxing and dining with Manuel. Highlights of the evening include cutting up spaghetti with "ciseau des pâtes", watching a two-year-old boy deposit a very expensive and very healthy bowl of organic yogurt all over his face, and facing the inquisition of Manuel's daughter, who groaned when I failed to answer questions intended to be easy for French children. It turns out that there is a whole world of French that I simply do not speak. The secret is that talking like an adult is actually very easy in French; most important sounding French words are just English words with an accent ("Je support une unification entre la capitalisme et la socialisme"). Children's words, on the other hand, the words of everyday objects and stuff you find around the house, are a rapid-fire barrage of impossible, two-syllable contortions. They also make no goddamned sense, as in "Mon chameau a perdu ses moufles." Sometimes context clues are so good you don't even need language, and sometimes relying on context can actually make you so stupid you fail the Turing test. Me: "Um, so you want me to clear your plate?" Her: "No you fucking moron, my camel needs to find his mittens. Who said anything about plates?"
Most importantly I learned a new word, a word so good it has literally made this entire trip worthwhile. That word is "bobo", an abbreviated form of "bourgeois bohemian", or a practitioner of that highly enviable lifestyle wherein you spend all your time smoking, drinking, discussing and fucking, but doing it all without any apparent effort and in great material comfort. Le boboïsme, as it's known, is probably the closest French equivalent to gentrification; the word gentrification finds itself used more often in technical rather than informal settings. So one can speak of a neighborhood being "boboïsé" or of a movie being "trop bobo"; the latter is impossible to say aloud without smiling. On an assonance-inspired dopamine high I imagined the phrase "lolo bobo", or "bourgeois titties". I'm not sure what that would be or when to use it.
In closing, this is where I did not have lunch today.
You are correct, I did not have lunch here because the place was called flunch. Flunch, as in "I fucked up your lunch", or "I did the best I could, but in the end I flunched it." No thanks.
 |
| Part beer, part Geneva convention violation |
Today I did not climb a tree but instead went to Montreuil. No, I am not a mentally dislocated chimp who thinks that tree climbing and subway riding are somehow equivalent. I have been unable to climb any trees because a) this city doesn't have any and b) it will not stop raining. Maybe once the sun comes out I'll wander down to Jardin de Luxembourg and find a nice elm to scale or something, but for now this blog is staying grounded. Actually between working all day at IRCAM and making my way out to the banlieu I'm not sure I would have had any time to climb anyway. Montreuil isn't exactly far but it's not exactly near either. The wonderful magic of Paris is that unlike New York or San Francisco, cities with very firm geological boundaries, Paris simply extends forever in every direction. Sitting on a big, flat plain means that adding one metro stop and a few houses will always be easier than doing any actual urban development. In the center of the city this is actually pretty great; no tall buildings means that lying on the grass feels like being literally inside the sky. On the other hand, it means that interesting things to do can be pretty far away from each other and that you can lose a good part of the day hopping from metro to metro.
I should just mention at this point that I went out to Montreuil to meet Manuel, a fellow Cycling '74 emploi whose house I'll be renting for the next month or so. His house does not look something like this. These are photographs of his house, so his house looks exactly like this:
Anyway, I had a festival of a time relaxing and dining with Manuel. Highlights of the evening include cutting up spaghetti with "ciseau des pâtes", watching a two-year-old boy deposit a very expensive and very healthy bowl of organic yogurt all over his face, and facing the inquisition of Manuel's daughter, who groaned when I failed to answer questions intended to be easy for French children. It turns out that there is a whole world of French that I simply do not speak. The secret is that talking like an adult is actually very easy in French; most important sounding French words are just English words with an accent ("Je support une unification entre la capitalisme et la socialisme"). Children's words, on the other hand, the words of everyday objects and stuff you find around the house, are a rapid-fire barrage of impossible, two-syllable contortions. They also make no goddamned sense, as in "Mon chameau a perdu ses moufles." Sometimes context clues are so good you don't even need language, and sometimes relying on context can actually make you so stupid you fail the Turing test. Me: "Um, so you want me to clear your plate?" Her: "No you fucking moron, my camel needs to find his mittens. Who said anything about plates?"
Most importantly I learned a new word, a word so good it has literally made this entire trip worthwhile. That word is "bobo", an abbreviated form of "bourgeois bohemian", or a practitioner of that highly enviable lifestyle wherein you spend all your time smoking, drinking, discussing and fucking, but doing it all without any apparent effort and in great material comfort. Le boboïsme, as it's known, is probably the closest French equivalent to gentrification; the word gentrification finds itself used more often in technical rather than informal settings. So one can speak of a neighborhood being "boboïsé" or of a movie being "trop bobo"; the latter is impossible to say aloud without smiling. On an assonance-inspired dopamine high I imagined the phrase "lolo bobo", or "bourgeois titties". I'm not sure what that would be or when to use it.
In closing, this is where I did not have lunch today.
You are correct, I did not have lunch here because the place was called flunch. Flunch, as in "I fucked up your lunch", or "I did the best I could, but in the end I flunched it." No thanks.
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