Nil By Mouth

Nils is one of the

Nils is one of the coolest silliest awesomest – just plain fun people i’ve met here so far. You must check out his Stupid Dance here. It’s so cool. How can we get him his own sitcom?

Meanwhile tonight is my soiree. I’m sorta nervous. The guest list was at first 13. Then the sorry-i’m-away-this-weekend’s started piling up and i had down to about 6. Then in some bizarre twist of fate, or rather by word of mouth, it has crept into the 25-35 area. Wow. So i’m listing now. Listing (def. making lists) is the procrastinators ultimate weapon. I’ll need all sorts of things that normal people have, like cups, plates, serving platters. Also i need to make the menu. It’s a party but this whole thing was i think an excuse for me to get to go shopping at all the cute speciality shops in my neighborhood. Anyway, wish me luck.

Nov 17
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Via dangerous monkey, seems that

Via dangerous monkey, seems that ms Heather Havrilesky has a blog up and i am so thrilled. My wednesdays have been been so bland since filler died. If you’re not sure where i am, it’s proabably there – - >

Also, the “festival” was really just “all the bars are crowded and everyone’s drinking more than they should”. But it was fun anyway. The first sip of the new Noveau was too sweet and too strong but down somewhere in the bottom of the second glass it started to taste might-ee fine. Needless to say we abandoned the ordering-by-glass charade and leapt into the bottles. Today i am appropriately headache-y, queasy, my tongue is stained purple, and there is bugundy ground into the chapped spots on my lips. Red wine hangover : Blech.

Also a friend of Dori’s who just moved here came out with us, and she was quite cool. As per custom a table of three new yorkers, even in a bar in paris, even during a wine festival, even having barely met, immediately began comparing our new york rents. It’s good to know that there are certain natural laws that just cannot be broken.

Nov 16
1,144 Comments

So let’s see. The Beaujolais

So let’s see. The Beaujolais Festival is tonight. Since i have pretty much no knowledge of my own about this thing here’s what Heather’s list says about it:

It takes place every third Thursday in November. If you’re not familiar with the idea behind the festival, here’s the rundown: The dark gamay grapes produce the first drinkable wine early in autumn, so Beaujolais Nouveau had been the chosen wine for the old French celebration of Saint-Martin on November 11 (which is no longer celebrated since it became upstaged by Armistice Day after WWI).

Since 1951 Beaujolais Nouveau gets its own special day. There are a few people out there who humbug the fun, and even those who claim the wine isn’t any good. But there’s a lot of fun to be had in Paris (and no doubt in Francophile places around the world) no matter what your opinion is on the young and fruity red wine. This year, according to the French wine pundits, the new wine has hints of red currant, strawberry and raspberry, and a peony color.

—

In fact many of my work-mates think the Beaujolais is crappy wine. In a discussion this afternoon they introduced me to the word “Oenologue” which they defined for me as [verbatim] “a professor of wine science”. Which sent me into peals of laughter. This was an appreciative laughter, let me point out.

Anyway i guess all the old school cafes and brasseries celebrate with specials with specials on the wine, and i even read about what can be described as a “Wine Marathon”. This was a challenge where people were invited to do sort of a “pub-crawl” along all the bars/cafes in St. Germain. 42 to be exact, one glass in each. Cause you know there are 42 kilometers in a marathon. Now that’s my kind of marathon! Although i am still a major lightweight, i’d probably crap out before i even got into double digits.

So anyway i have no idea where to go. I’m thinking the Ile St Louis, which is this little island in the middle of the Seine, just because it’s sort of very quaint old little area which has not been modernized, but very well maintained. I pictured lots of dancing in the streets but i don’t think that’s the case unfortunately (until maybe after everyone’s real real lit anyway). Its also slated to reach 25 F (-4 C) this evening, so the only street dancing i can see myself doing is the dance of frooze toes. It’s real popular with Californians who’ve moved too far north and east.

There’s a buncha events in the states, mostly sponsored by the Alliance Francaise celebrating the event also. But if your appetite is whetted for a red-wine hangover, i bet if you go to the most authentic french restaurant you know, they’ll do somethin’. And if they aren’t, casually mention all the fun-facts i told you and maybe you’ll get to go home with an easily impressed frenchie (actually that *may* be an oxymoron).

Nov 15
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As interruption to your regularly

As interruption to your regularly scheduled programming i’d like to post a link to forever-fab Dori’s, Jewlrey Box Spot. She makes some great stuff and none of it is over-priced. I saw her sportin The Red Glass Choker at a halloween shindig and it was Hot. One can’t be sure if it was the necklace or the neck, but either way.. damn.

So if you’re looking for christmas gifts (or my birthday is comin up) you know where to go first.

Nov 15
93 Comments

Tee hee – i’m having

Tee hee – i’m having a party, i mean a soiree.

Check out the invite, and hey if yer in the paris area, venez!

Nov 13
950 Comments

So i’m waffling on going

So i’m waffling on going to this hip-hop club tonight. Through my pauvre perusing of listings, it seems to be the closest and handiest place for me to shake what my momma gave me. But of course it’s Sunday night and i’m a bit fearful of waking up for work in the morning. And that’s not even accounting for how hard it is to get out of bed considering my apt is fweezing. My aunt gave me a portable radiator which has helped a lot. It’s even broken through 60F in the bedroom today – woo hoo. (BTW, i am not kidding about being happy – 60 is bliss at this moment).

I’ve cleaned for probably a total of 12 hours this weekend and my apartment is immaculate. Immaculate. Uh-huh. Last night i wandered around the right bank in search of lone fun-sters that i’ve definitely seen there before. They weren’t there but i could chalk that up to the below freezing temperature that seems to have infected Paris in the past few days. I ended up (after a very long walk) at the dutch bar, nursing a pint of Grolsch and chatting with another regular in painfully broken English. I kept telling him to speak French but he pretty much refused. And i think in this case oddly enough, my French was probably better than his English.

Also i have slept for 11-12 hours a night for the last three nights in a row. [shrug] Sometime’s a girl’s just tired i guess.

So, i bought a plant today. For someone reason, to me buying a plant is to a place what leaving a toothbrush at a lover’s house is to a relationship. It’s kind of like that “Ok we’re gonna be together for awhile now. Right? Right???” I went through this same back and forth about buying plants for my last place. Sure enough i got laid off the week after the roots told hold. Thing is, i love plants, i mean i loooove ‘em. So i have a hard time leaving them. So i have a hard time buying them. As an act of self-defiance i bought a plant on my first day to work here in Paris. It actually was barely alive when i came back from Istanbul because no one thought to water him (his name’s Pepe le Plant and no one gets it). When i quizzed my coworkers on this (all male french engineers) they said, “Oh you know vee are men, vee don’t vater zee plants”. This past time i left for New York i gave them clear instructions. And they were very good about it. Funny thing is i would get an e-mail or an ICQ every other day or so from one of them proudly declaring that he watered him, awaiting effusive praise i suppose. Ohh zee men…

— In the meantime plans for hip-hop tonight have been thwarted but plans for hip-hop on Wednesday have been tentatively made —

So anyway, she’s a cute lil thing with lil red flowers. I’ve already decided she’s a she but haven’t come up with a name yet. Go ahead and make a suggestion on the comments box. This either means i’ll be here for awhile or get sent packing next week. Who’s taking bets?

Nov 11
10 Comments

FOUND magazine- A 21 Balloons

FOUND magazine- A 21 Balloons Production.

Found from the *best* list, this stuff is really cool. I guarantee you’ll page through the entire site, and then wish there was more.

Nov 11
944 Comments

I thought i would

I thought i would just post a picture (i have no scanner) of the cover (the cover) of Nova’s monthly nightlife guide to Paris.

WoW.

Sometimes i do love this city…

Nov 11
11 Comments

Holy mother of… my old

Holy mother of… my old roommate, Sebastian, is quoted in this weeks cover story in The Village Voice about Brooklyn’s night life. I guess he promotes the coolest space in dumbo now, which is completely baffling to one who remembers him as physically unable to empty an ashtray or run some water over his crusted mugs before the tea-bag became permanently sealed to its edge. I still hold him responsible for forcing me out of probably the coolest space i’ll ever live in by sheer intolerable laziness. Well there was also the poisonous exhaust fumes that seeped in from the dump-trucks in the garage just underneath us but negativity is so much easier focussed on people. Yes roommate bitterness never really goes away.

Meanwhile i’m back in Paris as of yesterday. It was a slight shock to the system for 2 reasons. One being that it is colder than a rat’s ass. Secondly i am re-acclimating myself to the world of sketchy communication. After a full 12 days of small talk, big talk, complimenting strangers on their footwear, ordering food with complete authority, even asking for a pair of pants in a smaller size, it’s back to mistaking the question, “Are you ringing?” with “Do you smell?”. I did that last night and smell and ring are very similarly pronounced, ok!?

New York was great. It was hard to leave. You never realize what you have until you don’t. Sho ’nuff. Except there is this one majorly huge thing that Paris has that New York doesn’t : a job for me. My week in the big apple was no different from all my other recent weeks in that there were a few more people i knew laid off. No one seems to be visibly distressed but me. Well maybe there are a few distressed folks, but not enough of them and not distressed enough either. Bloomberg won the mayoral election. Honestly i haven’t followed the election at all, but i am only slightly less disconcerted than when Dubya “won”. It just seems so… so… wrong.

Since my apartment has just about enough heat to warm up a small closet, i’ve decided to do a major cleaning to get the blood circulating this weekend. I’ll have to do an all out search for cleaning supplies, but it is a necessity. That and trying to find myself a set of french lessons on CD. I no longer own a tape deck. Even the words sound quaint, tape deck, tape deck, tape deck. Let those words sooth you into a relaxed state… tape deck, tape deck, tape deck