NEEDLING

NOTES FROM MY SPIRAL
SATURDAY AFTERNOON LAYING ALONG THE CANAL DE L'OURCQ BASSIN DE LA VILLETTE

The rowers in their little rowing boats with sliding seats up and down the lengths of the little boats
They look good with their numbers painted on their sides
Sliding along in the water splashing some of them gliding some others with the ducks and the bateaux mouches
# 4 keeps rowing by me where I’m lying down on the cement with my sandals off drinking a tall boy
She’s wearing a red t-shirt
I’m wearing a red sweat-shirt and I’m reading Jeffers
Every time she rows by my few inches of cement under the sun, she gets a little closer
Almost splashing me from her paddling the water, rowing that green slime they call a canal
She’s not very good at rowing
There’s an old man and his wife fishing up the quai with several fishing poles stuck out into the water
I don’t think I’d eat a fish if that fish came out of that water
And then again, maybe I would… it depends, I guess…
I don’t think I’d willingly eat a fish that came out of that water if I could help it and if I had a better option.

Oh… I mistook # 4 for # 37… # 37 for # 4…
They’re both blonds wearing red t-shirts
They both have large breasts
They both are wearing blue-geans
They’re both rowing up and down the canal from the Rotound to not far from where that circus used to be
And I thought it was one girl who kept getting closer and closer to me
There was two girls in two different boats in two separate red t-shirts
Four breasts
I must be a sexist pig because I didn’t notice till now that one has short hair and the other long hair
Goes to prove where I was looking.

I want to go rowing with the ducks and the bateaux mouches too
And I especially want to go ridding on a bateau mouche like the one that just slid by
One of the ex-freighter kind closed up to be made into a floating home
Several people on deck barefoot around a table with loads of empty wine bottles
One guy was on the phone away from the other folks
The others were sitting in a semi circle having what seemed like an after lunch smoke
And the captain was stirring from his little cabin
He also wore a red shirt.

# 37 is coming by again
I can tell them apart now, I’m so proud of myself

Sometimes I love Paris
Where else can I sit on the edge of the canal barefoot, having a couple of tall boys reading Jeffers?
With all the bourgeois and the young people and the old couple strolling up and down the quai
And the people rowing up and down the canal
How can I move back to Texas in July with Paris right here, at my feet, underneath my ass?
On days such as this I tell myself I don’t need a job
I don’t need money
I don’t need a schedule
I definitely don’t need to earn a living
I just need to lay my ass down about the city staring at the beautiful people
Even the ugly ones
In the sun…

There’s two fellows in one boat, their boat is a longer boat than the others
It’s designed for two people and it’s numbered # 1
They’re pros going about their business faster than the birds barely making any waves
Or splashes
They’re lean wearing white wife-beaters or Marcelle’s as we say in these parts
They take themselves very seriously
They mean business
I wonder if they’ll be able to slow down enough to make the turn when they get to end of the bassin
Nothing like # 4 who really struggles
She was just ten feet away from me and I was ducking her paddles thinking I was gonna get paddled…

Saturday afternoon waiting for the movies…

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOTTLE

Whiskey night yogurt goblets
it’s that kind of time
I’m having with the lights off…

Like a dog pissing on a night post
lighting a dead street
long after midnight
long after the last bars have shut
long past the shadows
long since I’ve felt this sober
long after the third rooster’s crow
long after nothing has come
long past the deadline
long since we’ve all fried in hell
lighting ourselves kamikaze & molatov
like a dog pissing on the flame to put out the fire.

Failure is the word prowling
in the background
shades on
slick hairdo backwards
greased back in a flat twenties gangster’s shoe polish mojo.

I’m the dude singing the bad song
bringing down the fat gong
killing off the last bed bugs in the mattress
infesting weddings beneath my skin
like rings of marital flings stringing Garth, the school boy…

Whiskey baby, tell me the truth
for once and for all
lets all be done and gone with it
lets deal it raw on the table
like a dead baby
hanging to the shreds of scapegoat bush fire next to the shed…

Whiskey baby, tell me the truth
for once
lets all of it be naked like stark snow flakes
lets speak freely standing on the roof with locked doors
lets drink ourselves to death
and wake up in the morning remembering nothing about nothing
lets make promises after promises
and keep not a single one of them…

Whiskey baby…

PSYCHING MYSELF FOR WORK

Ten till twelve, all cleaned up with holes in my socks. Downed a couple of fresh mozarella and tomatoe sandwiches. A little half salted butter, some whole cumin, black pepper, and a couple of green lettuce leafs. Good stuff. Tonight after work I'm meeting my fellow writer's group members so we can discuss the futur of our little group, a futur which will hopefully be long and fruitfull. I don't want to go to the hotel today. Oh well... I've got that pint of Abeye beer at the Bar des Artists waiting for me as soon as I sit down with my fellow group members... that should make those six hours go by me like nothing, like sailing in an ocean of Belgium beer passing moutains of chips and peanuts...

MOONSHINE

The entrance hallway of my building smells like a fermenting sock with a slight after-bite of petrol. I’m half suspecting the concierge’s husband to be experimenting with the distillation of his own personal liquor/ moonshine. Possibly in their WC which gives right onto the main hallway of the building. The smell started about two days ago. At first I thought that it might be an old cheese they’d left on their kitchen window sill to air out a little and kill a few pigeons, but the smell has not only persisted, it’s gotten a little more intense from day to day.

I like my concierge, I want to make that clear. They’ve been great. They’re a Serbian couple who’ve been living in and out of France for the last twenty years and they’ve been the concierge at my building for approximately the last three years.

Last year at Easter time the husband found himself at home alone, as his wife had gone back to the village – in the ex-republic of Yougoslavia – to celebrate Easter with her family and especially their many children, none of whom live with them being their all grown adults. Serbian Orthodox Easter is on a different day than not only the Catholic Easter, on account of the Gregorian vs. the Julian calendars, but also on a different date as the Greek & Russian Orthodox Easters… for what reason I don’t know. I asked him at the time a year ago if he was sure of this information, and he responded that definitely he was sure. I have not looked this up anywhere to get any kind of validation. I guess it’s possible that the different Orthodox pontiff set Easter on different Sundays just to make sure everything religion-wise remains complicated. Easter also happens to be their most important holiday, more important than Christmas, and he was feeling lonely so he invited me into the concierge lodge to have a drink with him, during which time he would pull out pictures of saints and tell me their stories. Unfortunately, since he couldn’t always express himself in coherent French, he would often use Serbian words, or switch completely to Serbian when the stories became too complicated. As the glasses of whiskey multiplied, I started understanding some of the stories, or thought that I understood them. Before switching to Serbian, he would often go into great pantomimes to make a point, or deliver more clearly a particularly important image in the saint’s life, or more often than not, a saint’s martyrdom.

This last new year, as is the custom in France, I gave my concierge an envelope with some cash in it. To that I also added a nice bottle of wine. Like I said, I like my concierge, and last year they were particularly helpful in several situations. I usually give them a bottle of wine whenever I ask them an important favor. I think it’s only fair, and anyway in France it’s very important that the concierge be your friend, especially if you’re leasing. For example last time I left my place for eight months to bum around the States from Maine to Texas where I visited many of my friends and made quite a few new ones, and that I subleased my place – a common yet mostly illegal practice in France – I knew I had nothing to fear as far as the concierge went. They kept my mail, gave it to my friend whenever she came over to pick it up, and as far as anybody was concerned, the young man in my studio was a distant American cousin of mine who was taking care of my plants while I was away.

At new year’s, when I gave them the envelope and the bottle of wine, they insisted that I come in for a drink. They wouldn’t take no for an answer, and if I insisted they would have taken it as an offense, so I went in the lodge and sat down. At first, they offered me a cup of coffee and I accepted with relief. But then the husband went reaching into the bottom cup-board in a dark corner of the room and came out with a 1.5 liter plastic bottle, those bottles designed strictly for mineral water. He had a big smile on his face. He held the bottle with extreme care, with reverence even, like a small child or a porcelain vase from Chinese antiquity… yet it wasn’t any of the above. It was a dirty plastic bottle with clear liquid that had a slight greenish lime color. I gulped. I was scared.

“This is just like we find it in the village. My friend, he lives here now, but he’s from the same village, he makes it and he sells it only to friends. Just like in the village.”

The word “village” I find is used by immigrants, wherever they might be from, in relation to something important, usually it has something to do with family, with weddings or funerals, or with religion… or a custom related to one of these rituals. Anyway, there’s almost always some sort of respect in the manor which it is spoken. And every single time he said the word, I got a little more scared. There was no way out of the lodge without having a drink of whatever was in that bottle without offending them.

“You want to try?”
“Uhmm… only a little… just a very tiny bit, just to get a little taste of your village, but you know, I have to work this afternoon…” oh yeah, I forgot to mention it was barely eleven in the morning.
“What time do you have to be at work?”
I can’t lie to save my life, so I said the truth, “13h00.”
“That’s in two hours, no problem,” he said. I should have said in half an hour.
“Ok, ok… but just a drop, ok?”
He gave me a tumbler the size of sowing dice, and poured himself one the same size.
“So… they make this stuff in your village?”
“Yes, it’s a tradition. This here is very close to the stuff they make in the village. It’s the closest I’ve found so far.”
“How strong is it?” I asked, then suggested an answer, “about fifty proof?”
“Fifty proof! No.” I was relieved, but then he went on, “it’s at least 75 proof, but then we have no way of knowing for sure.”

I held my breath and downed the tumbler. Strong, yes, but it didn't tear up my entire throat, not as much as I expected. He poured me another one before I could hide the tumbler.

“Just a little more,” he said, really proud of himself.
“I really shouldn’t, I have to work this afternoon.”
“That’s no problem, just a tiny glass, it can do no harm.”

I was able to exit with only two and one half tumbler all together. By the time I arrived at the hotel, I kept looking at myself in the mirror, as it felt as if I had a baseball on fire instead of a nose hanging on to my face. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t all red. I kept having heat flashes throughout the day for no reason whatsoever, and the world, two hours after the ingestion of that lime green clear petrol-like liquid, had become a haze in which I had to keep constant concentration to keep it in focus.

He told me his friend sells these 1.5 liter bottle of jet fuel for a mere 15 Euros.

I’m afraid he might be experimenting in his WC to produce this gasoline extract himself, and thus save himself the trouble of paying his friend the money. Soon, the several hundred people who live in my building, might start walking around in a haze, after having to breath those fumes coming from the concierge’s lodge.

THE RESIDENTS OF ROOM 34

Me and Kamel were wondering about the residents of room number 34. A Turkish couple in their fifties. Every night they leave and don’t come back to the hotel till six or six thirty in the morning. Neither one speaks French, English, or Arab, so there’s no way to communicate with them. Me and Kamel were a bit worried because they’re three days late on the payment of the room and we don’t know exactly what their agreement is with the other day receptionist, who doesn’t speak to either Kamel or me other than the obligatory hello and goodbye on shift changes.

“Every night, he wears a nice suit and has a second one on his arms. Sometimes, his wife stays at the hotel and doesn’t go with him.” Kamel says.
“What does this guy do? Does he party every night?”
“I don’t know. They never come in drunk or anything. But when his wife goes along, she also dresses up to the hilt.”
“They go clubbing every single night, you think?”
“They’re in their fifties.”
“Hey, you know… who knows.”

But then I think about the couple in question. Both short, stocky. His suits are brand new but of another era, so to say, and the dresses she wears I would never imagine her dancing in a night club. They don't fit the profile. I simply can't imagine them clubbing every night, not in what I thinka cub is anyway. The man wears what apparently is a wig, a very black one. Either that or he tints his hair pitch black with shoe polish.

When they came in late this afternoon, I decided to take the bull by the horn and pointed at the computer screen to show him his bill. I smiled and made as many friendly questioning gestures as I could think of. He waved for me to wait a second. He ran across the street were his son or somebody he knows and who paid for their first night at the hotel owns a Turkish sandwich restaurant, and came back with the cook.

The cook in his greasy whites, still sweating from the kebab meat stand looked at me questioningly. He said nothing. He waited for me to start.

“Uhm…” I started. “Your friends, they owe so much money. I’m not really sure how to communicate that to them.”
He nods, waiting for me to continue. He doesn’t translate.
“The way we work in this hotel,” I explain, “is that either they pay from day to day, or they pay several days in advance… if you want to continue paying in cash; or they can give me a credit card and an ID, I take one night form the card to get an imprint, and there’s no problem. Either way, I need some sort of guarantee.”
“Okay, I understand.” Then he explains in Turkish what I’ve been saying, or I presume since I don’t speak Turkish, and turns back to me. “Till what time are you here?”
“19h00.”
“7 tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I come back around 6 tonight, and I pay for what they owe and for another week. I have to wait till the boss comes back. Okay?”
“Fine, no problem.”

The couple goes up to their room. The greasy cook goes back to his grill. I stay at my reception.

Fifteen minutes later, another man, an older man this time, arrives at the hotel. He parks his beat-up Mercedes station wagon in front of the hotel in the bus-lane and puts his blinkers on. He also is Turkish, and he wants to speak to room number 34. He speaks French with a strong accent, forgetting words here and there. It’s a bit difficult to understand him. I hand him the phone. After he says what he has to say, he hands me the phone back for me to hang up. Then he leans against the reception and we both stare at each other not sure what to say or not say.

He seems like a nice man. He’s obviously waiting for the residents of room number 34 to come down.

“We’re going to a wedding.”
“Ohhh, a wedding,” feigning interest.
“Yes.”
Long pauses while we’re both feeling awkward. I wished he’d go wait in his car or sit on the couch. We try to communicate but it’s difficult. We get a few things across.
“You know he’s a singer.” The older man says. I have to make him repeat that several times before I understand. “A well known singer.”
“He’s a well known singer in Turkey?”
“Yes. In Turkey.”
“He’s very well known?”
“Well… not so much… a little well known. Medium. Yes, he’s medium well known.”
“Only in Turkey?”
“Eastern Turkey, you know. Mostly in Kurdistan.”
“Ohh...”
“He’s sold 450 thousand or 500 thousand cassettes.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“Yes. Not bad. Today, he’s singing at wedding. Extra.”

And so on. I found out little by little that we have a famous Kurd pop singer staying in room number 34, and that every night, from about two till five in the morning, he gives concerts in a concert hall right outside of Paris. I also found out that the older man who came to pick him up runs a sewing shop in the suburbs, that he’s been in France 22 years, has had a French passport for 10, and has lived right outside of Paris for 3. He used to live in the Sentier, but the competition for all textile business was too strong, so he moved out. He does patch-up work, and when he first opened his store, he was the only one anywhere in the neighborhood, but that now there’s two new stores and business has gone way down and things aren’t as good as they were before.

The residents of room number 34 finally came down and took us out of our difficult trial in communication so that the famous Kurd singer could go do a Wedding extra for the next few hours.

THE ALEXANDRIAN MYSTERY

Today I had three rooms at the hotel with Egyptian Copts. One of them asked me if I could find the Coptic Orthodox church in Paris. Apparently there’s a famous priest who preaches there. He told me the name of the priest. I found the church and the phone number for him. It’s far outside of Paris, though, and I’m not sure how he’s going to get himself there. There’s pictures of the priest shaking hands with Pope John Paul, with the French president Chirac, with Italian prime minister Berlusconi. The five Egyptians are not only Coptic, they’re also cops in Cairo, even though they look like normal forty to fifty something a bit overweight dads out on holiday… which is certainly the case unless you have an over-active imagination and nothing to do for twelve hours straight. Other than the address and phone number of the church, they also wanted to know where they could buy scuba-diving gear and remote-control toy boats. The one fellow who has the room to himself… they have three rooms : two twins and one single... The one guys who gets the single, he’s the one that spoke to me, told me he was Coptic and so on. I’ve never met a Coptic person that I know of, and there’s something mysterious about it to me. Maybe it’s because it’s one of the oldest organized Christian church in existence, that they have the oldest monasteries around, that they’re from Egypt, or probably because I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know. Anyway, there’s got to be a story in here somewhere. Some mystery that links one back to the burning of the famous library in Alexandria to some murder in the Parisian banlieue.
“I’ve always wanted to visit the monasteries there,” I said.
“You know about the monasteries?”
“I know… I know… not really, I don’t know anything except that they seem mysterious to me, being that they are some of the oldest monasteries in the Christian world.”
“You come to Egypt, there’s no problem, I can show you around.”
“Really? I thought they were basically closed to most everybody.”
“Well, they’re closed and they’re not closed. I have lots of friends who are monks, so, if you want, I can show you.”
“Well… thanks… if ever I come to Egypt, I’ll look you up.”
In the mean time, I spent the afternoon looking up addresses for them while they were out strolling about the city. Seems like I got gipped in the process. Well... there was nobody at the hotel, and it gave me something to do. It also got my curiosity going. I think I might go pay a visit to the church myself, to see the famous priest in action.

LETTERS FROM MY WINDMILL

Stepped out of the studio and went for a much needed little walk. And what a day for a walk. Found myself at the Père Lachaise walking around the tiny alleyways. What I like to do when I go there is get off the main pathways. I like to walk among the graves and get lost. The small alleyways and the main pathways go in all direction taking turns and such. In the older part of the cemetery, with the hills, the old trees, the decrepit graves, it’s easy to forget which way is which.

I sat down on a flat tomb stone to write on my spiral journal. I’m not happy with this blog, though I think it’s slowly going in the direction where eventually I’ll be happier with it, and I was asking myself some questions on how I could improve and find what I’m looking for. I was also feeling a little bad because I had fun last night and my entry makes it sound as if I didn’t enjoy the company who came to diner. It’s that I woke up with a horrible hangover, completely dehydrated, congested, and unable to go back to sleep. It was barely 8h30 and I found myself instantly in a bad mood. An acutely selfish bad mood. By the time I’d sat down on the grave stone, forty or so minutes after I’d left my place, I felt much better with life in general. Cemeteries do this to me. Especially this particular cemetery.

I never go to the Père Lachaise looking for any particular grave. I prefer as I said to get lost and to come upon different graves by accident. I sat scribbling on my notepad having chosen the slab I sat on for no reason except that it was very old, you couldn’t read any of the inscriptions that were once on it, that it was black from dirt and age, and that nobody in their right mind could be offended for me sitting on it. That’s why I chose it. Plus it was off the main track and I figured I’d be left alone.

To my amazement, a family of three stopped at a grave just next to mine, stood on top of the grave, and took a picture in the opposite direction. After they left and that I was through scribbling, I got up and looked in the direction they were pointing the camera. A medium size square mausoleum with nothing special about it except a bronze portrait of a mustached man. If you’re looking for this grave, you have to know exactly where it’s at because the portrait is in the back of the mausoleum and hidden behind and between a couple of gravestones. You cannot see it. I was sitting right next to it and I hadn’t noticed it. I got closer to read the inscription on the white marble the bronze portrait is set against. I could barely make out the name: Alphonse Daudet, 1840-1887.

After that I started walking towards Oscar Wilde’s grave. This goes against my personally imposed Père Lachaise visiting regulations but I wanted to go there. (The rule being I should have absolutely no itinerary.) It’s one of the easier ones to find. It stands on an important pathway in the newer side of the cemetery where instead of winding alleyways everything is square. It stands not far from Place Gambeta. You can’t miss it. It’s imposing looking, massive, and I like admiring it every once in a while. I passed the crematorium, took a right, and came back wanting to reach it from the back. And for some reason I walked right passed it without seeing it even though I looked everywhere for it. Then I was completely lost. Couldn’t make out my location. Which way my studio, place Gambeta, the boulevard… totally déboussole… I was all turned around so I kept walking missing Wilde’s resting spot and eventually deciding not to go back looking for it. I stepped out of the cemetery rue de la Reunion.

I’m sitting in a café rue St. Bernard, now. I’m having a couple of demis and a sandwich jambon-beurre checking out “Lettres de mon Moulin” by Daudet. Right before stepping into this café, I bought a copy at a nearby bookstore. It was the only book they had by him in the whole store.

Does that book hold any answers for me concerning my blog? Quite possibly.

TEN TILL TWELVE

The good news for the moment: my head is recovering, I've decided to not do the dishes till an undefined later moment in time, at which point I will also take out the trash. Currently surfing and reading interesting tid bits of good news such as this which reminds me that it's a beautiful sunny day, that I'm not at my favorite hotel - where the elevator has been dead for over a week, meaning walking up and down five flights of stairs with heavy luggage belonging to angry customers... people, when you take a few days vacation to Paris, you don't need to fill your luggage with heavy unidentified objects made of steel, rock, or iron; leave your books, bottles, and tool belts at home... a couple change of underwear, a couple of clean shirts and your tooth brush will do... think of the receptionists around the world who work in cheap hotels where elevators are bound to break down... - I should be outside! Rolling around on the grass at the Buttes Chaumont or something.

(above masturbation article link found on this blog.)

NOT FEELING SO GOOD

Difficult morning. I’ve got to stop drinking or I’m gonna end up with a heart attack. And that certainly wouldn’t be good for my health.

The food came out great. I used a mixture of flour, corn meal, red & black pepper, cumin and basilica for the crust. To get that sticking to the chicken, I mixed melted butter, milk, and a couple eggs. I would have preferred buttermilk but I don’t know where to find buttermilk in my neighborhood. I added a couple of large carrots cut up in slices and a large yellow onion roughly cut to the beans about forty minutes before they were done. Some long grain white rice, some tomato & garlic & fresh parsley salad with lemon-mustard-olive oil dressing. Simple stuff with a little green leaf lettuce. It all turned out quite nice.

However, the fact that I don’t own any proper glasses – I use ex-yogurt jars – and that half my plates are broken, made a bigger effect on my guests I think than the food itself.

Everybody loved the bread from my favorite boulanger, the best boulanger in Paris (I should know, I’ve tried bread and different baking goods in lots of boulangeries throughout Paris). It’s too bad that when he retires there won’t be anybody to replace him. Like so many of the artisan food-makers in Paris, when they retire there’s nobody behind them to take the reins of their stores, so they close down and eventually the stores reopen as take-out fast-food shops, or cheap counterfeit clothing stores.

TIME FOR A NAP IN THE BATHTUB

There’s raw food all over my studio. Now the trick is to see if I’ll be able to do something worth eating with it all. I got the black eye peas cooking right after I got back from work. I gave my studio a good clean. I even scrubbed the wooden floor after having swept it with an old sponge whipping up the water with a dirty rag. The beans were seasoned with some hot red pepper powder... from my favorite store where I buy all my beans, flours, rice, couscous, spices and grains... some whole cumin, some black pepper, some salt, about half a head of whole garlic, and some roughly cut yellow onion. They cooked at a low fire for a couple of hours before I turned the flame off to go shopping. It’s not even 16h30. Sean and the girls aren’t showing up till around 20h00 or 20h30. So I got me plenty of time. A little nap in the bathtub with a couple of cold beers is in order.

(Mix of music playing: Johnny Cash, Jacques Brel, Willy Nelson, Nick Cave, Ray Charles, Serge Gainsbourg, the Pogues, the Tiger Lillies, Patsy Kline, Hank Williams Sr., and one Charles Trenet…)

TO MY DEAR BROTHER TITUS

Early afternoon at my office, the 9 Billiards, after getting off of work. I took a bath last night around two in the morning, but this afternoon it feels as if I haven’t entered a clean body of water in weeks.

Pénible is the word which best describes my morning. Seven rooms out of thirty one, meaning dead, nothing to do, nobody to talk to, no maid, no phone calls, barely any faxes… nothing, just a plain long morning. One of these morning when I keep looking at the clock on the telephone every two minutes hoping at least half an hour has gone by… and invariably it’s always just two or three minutes.

At one point late in the morning getting close to midday [check-out time], one of the two rooms on the first floor started making lots of noise. Usually, the washing machine and dryer are going, the clients in the breakfast room are eating, the phone is ringing off the hook, Clementine the maid is talking my ears off, or mumbling to herself in the kitchen complaining about the dishwasher, or her back-pains, or her ears being too full of wax, or her husband getting on her nerves, or her boyfriend, or the other maids who said this and that and isn’t that just a lot of bull, or how her arm was once broken and couldn’t I carry the clean linen to the first floor… and this morning it was so quiet I could hear the clients fucking.

At first I didn’t know what it was. I was reading the novel L’Evangile selon Pilate, by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, when I started hearing some animal guttural noises. I stopped reading a second and decided it was a woman making the noises. Was she being killed by strangulation after having had her tongue cut off or were they fucking? I went up the stairs and they were definitely fucking and she was definitely screaming her head off, so I went back to my reception area, tried to ignore the clients getting one last fuck before checking out, and tried to concentrate on Schmitt’s imaginary interpretation of Pilate’s rendition of J.C.’s last Passover written in the form of letters from Pilate to his brother Titus in Rome. Did Pilate have a brother named Titus who lived in Rome? I didn’t know that.

OK… I have got some shopping to do, as I’m cooking diner tomorrow night and I’ve decided to do something very simple: Home Made fried chicken and black eye peas & rice with a little tomato garlic salad… god, I could just be insane and ad a little sausage to the black eye peas? Not too much since this is mostly a FRIED CHICKEN thing, but enough to rise the rice & beans out of complete banality… uhm… something to think about. Red Hot spicy corn crust for the chicken. I’m cheating, I ate at my friends’ place the other day and we made some fried chicken and light salad. I’m gonna do the crust a little differently, though, and I’m going for the ALL OUT bourratif yet simple plop down on the couch and can’t move for HOURS meal.

As we all know black eye peas to be what they need to be have to dip in water for minimum twenty-four hours BEFORE you start cooking them. And then you got to get them cooking slowly for a good three or so hours with constant attention so they don’t burn. Which is why I got to get going so I can get those beans dipping in their bath.

Me in along with them.

The rest will be fine... some baby corn, some steamed vegetables and a little brown gravy… simplicity...

AND THEN THERE WAS FIRE

The good news is that this is my day off. The other good news is that I slept from 10pm till 8h30am waking up only twice, and then only for brief moments of incomprehension that I was alive and sleeping. The third good news is that I found a box of water-proof camping matches. Not that my studio is flooded or anything, but all my fire-making instruments have disappeared in the last couple of days and I was left unable to strike a flame to my gas burner… and thus unable to boil water so as to make tea or coffee. I had placed those matches in a sure place, which took me one and a half day to uncover, because I had paid such a high price for them. I had bought them a couple years back for my three months bike trip which I undertook way back when from the center of France to its western coastline and back up north, so that rain snow or shine I would never be without fire… basically, I had purchased this tiny box of wooden fire instruments which can be struck while dry or moist and create, for an emergency, Fire... And here today, in the confine of my Parisian studio, they have finally served me. After seven days straight at my favorite hotel, I am able to get up this gorgeous morning and make myself some coffee so that I can step out of my studio into the world accompanied by my computer a couple of books, and have myself a good day. Cheers to all.

BLEEDING

There was a big scab of dry skin on my knee. I pulled it off. Large rivulets of blood keep pouring down my leg through my leg hair. I’m listening to Boris Vian en boucle, drinking what’s left of the wine Claire brought over. There isn’t much left then I should go to bed. The blood is thick and dark. Must mean I’m healthy.

WHY I WENT TO SEVERAL BARS LAST NIGHT

Morning glory. Head doing okay, all things considered. Did a little bar hopping yesterday evening on account I had made some descent tips at the hotel for once. Europeans in general don’t tip and the hotel industry is not one where people tip. Long gone are the days, if ever they existed, when you took a person up to her room and showed her the closets and bathroom and got a tip for it. That probably only existed in movies. The way we make tips? We work with taximan who when we call them for trips to the airports give us a percentage of the fare. We work with tour operators who when we sell their guided tours or whatever give us a percentage of the fee. That’s how we make tips. The last hotel I worked at a few years ago, we also had a couple of restaurants who gave us so much for every customer we sent them. For this they quickly became the most authentic French restaurant in the neighborhood as far as we were concerned. Last month I sold two parties of museum and guided mishmash Parisian stuff. I got me a nice two bills for it. It’s like free money. Too bad we’re not strictly a tourist hotel. We have mostly a business / government array of customers plus your usual daily come in for a shag customer who wants more than your run of the mill hôtel de passe. In our hotel I’m proud to say, you don’t have to be afraid to take off your shoes and walk barefooted as in some of our neighboring hotels. The sheets are changed daily… and washed. No wads of body dejections laying about underneath the beds and mattresses pouring out of their rubber hats. Bathrooms, toilets, televisions, heat and or air-conditioning in every single room. Unfortunately, tourist is where the money is and tourists is what we get very little of in our hotel. But not any kind of tourist buys into the tour-operator guided overpriced car or bus rides of the city. The Indians, which amazingly we’re getting a lot of these days, love that stuff. The never-been-out-of-America Americans used to gobble all that stuff up. They’ve stopped coming to France though, since George Wanker and his cronies re-baptized French-Fries Freedom-Fries… [anti-war / anti-bush rant goes here] … those kinds of Americans have stopped coming to France. Too bad to. There’s nothing more a receptionist likes to see than an American all dressed up in cowboy boots and cowboy hat walk in through the door of the hotel chewing ya’lls and howdido’s. (I know I’m stereotyping… incredibly enough, I’m not exaggerating…) That’s the kind of prairie grown tourist we like around here. Or the Michael Moore family look-alikes all got up with baggy pants, bermuda shorts, baseball hats (backward for the son, sideways for the dad, just visor for the mom, and goldilocks curled-up bangs for the daughter…) We love them too. And they just looooooove river-boat rides and diners up on the Eiffel Tower. But long gone are those days. Americans have started coming back to France, but usually they’re the more refined anti-Bush crowd (intelligent and better educated by definition) and they prefer to go discover the city on their own, which though bad for my pocket book I perfectly understand and agree with. The Indians are the new financially interesting tourists and they’ve never been to Europe and, like their American counterparts, want to see “all the important stuff” in two days. They want their picture taken next to the Eiffel Tower. That’s all they know about Paris. The Eiffel Tower. Unlike their American counterparts though, they haggle every price, every penny, everything. And we actually have to work for our share of the fee. I’m getting better at it. Two days ago I sold a van-tour of Paris with lunch and a guided walk through the Louvre to a party of three. I told them right away when they started on me, “Since there’s three of us, do you think we could get a little discount?”
“There’s no discussing the price with these people.” [meaning the tour-operator]
“But there’s three of us.”
“Doesn’t make a difference. There’s no haggling. You can’t discuss the price with a tour-operator in France. It’s against the rules.”
“Well… we won’t try, then.”
“Okay.”
“It’s good you told us,” they said without a bit of irony.

E.S.P.

Wow. The power of positive thinking! The minute I published my last entry they started waking up, snorting, spitting and getting up from the couch. They walked to the back. For a minute there I got scared they had decided to move to the breakfast room... but... no… they went to pick up their luggage and walked out the door.

LADIDA… LALALA… LADIDA DIDA DADA…

Hotel. Twirling my thumbs. Two guys sitting on the couch. They were extremely rude at breakfast time and throughout check-out. They’ve got a train to catch at 18h20. It’s barely pass 13h00. I hope they don’t intend to spend the whole day here, though it certainly looks like it. They’re both sitting on the couch saying nothing, staring at the wall. One of them keeps picking his nose. The maid told me their room was a mess. I need to go to the bathroom. There’s no lock on the cash box, which is why I keep the cash in my pocket. Even then I can’t leave the reception area if people are here. I want these two assholes to leave. Maybe if I think it hard enough, it will happen. Or maybe I should let out a big fart. Nuh, that’ll just make them feel at home. What jerks. It’s such a nice day too. They could go take a little friendly stroll. They could go do some last minute shopping. They could go to a café and have a coffee or a beer. They could just simply get the hell out of my hair! One of them is staring at a map now, the one who had been picking his nose. The other is falling asleep. I think I’m in for the long haul. Maybe I should tell them that after half an hour, we charge a fee for sitting on the couch. Somebody help me…

THE LAST NINE MOVIES I'VE SEEN AT THE CINEMA

BlaBlaBla… when are the good movies coming back to the theaters?

Agent Secret, by Frédéric Schoendoerffer
You stay in the dark the whole time. Modern espionage with a few necessary clichés. There aren’t any good guys. They’re all bad. It’s not a rollercoaster ride, the karate fight scene is horrible. For what it is, I had fun.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

Demain on déménage, by Chantal Akerman
I was suppose to see this with my mother the other day. But we were tired and hungry, so we decided to have a falafel rue de Rosier instead. We made a very good choice.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

Las Horas del Dia, by Jaime Rosales
Well, this movie thought it had a good idea, but once the gimmick dissipated, there was nothing left. You still need a good story to make a good movie.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

Malabar Princess, by Gilles Legrand
Okay, okay, so this movie goes for some soft melo-spots, but I had a lot of fun here, and in the end, that’s one important part of film going. Beautiful pictures of French country & rural life. I think this kind of role was made for Jacques Villeret.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

Feux Rouges, by Cédric Kahn
Jean-Pierre Darroussin is one of my favorite actors, and Kahn’s last movie Roberto Succo was one good movie. I had too much expectation for this film to give it unbiased attention. However, if you drink a little too much, you might not want to see this, as it goes right home and takes no prisoners.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

La Chambre Obscure, by Marie-Christine Questerbert
This is the kind of film which gets me upset with the French film subsidy policies. Then again, if it wasn’t for the subsidized industry, France wouldn’t have a film industry, so a few fuck-ups, even a lot of fuck-ups, is alright as long as the French film industry is not forced, anymore than it is already, to bow down to Hollywood. France has the only film industry worth anything left in Europe.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

Prendimi l'anima, by Roberto Faenza
Give me a break.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

Blueberry, l'expérience secrète, by Jan Kounen
Geese, I sat down expecting your regular run of the mill western. Boy was I wrong. If you’re a fan of peyolte, this is for you.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

Podium, by Yann Moix
Benoît Poelvoorde is one funny guy. I kindda wished I had a better knowledge of French pop culture while watching this film, but it isn’t necessary. Even if you don’t know who Claude François was, you can still get a good laugh.
IMDB
ALLO CINE

DAY OFF

Doing laundry at the local Laundromat. Dirty underwear & smelly sock excitement! Yeeeeh HAAAA!

MORNING

My yearning for those croissant hasn’t entirely subsided yet, so I stepped outside this morning with the hope of having had an hallucination the other day. Though it’s already nine in the morning, the streets are barely waking up. Most the store fronts are still down… the old people who sit on benches, the men who stand on the median smoking cigars and remaking the world, the kids playing basketball or dealing hash, the little old ladies slowly making their way to the fish market or the various butcher shops… are all still asleep or brushing their teeth. Nice day in the neighborhood.

I take a left on rue de l’Orillon, reputed as one of the worst streets in the neighborhood second only to rue Ramponeau. The same street actually, the name changes after you cross the boulevard de Belleville. I’ve never had any problems, though, I think it’s a myth. I take a right on the boulevard and find myself once more staring at the baker’s shelves.

In front of the store are stacks of boxes. The baker is coming in and out of his store taking boxes in, giving orders, discussing politics, and talking on his mobile telephone. All kinds of delicious looking sweets all over the place, but no croissant or any other kind of viennoiseries or bread. They look busy so I don’t bother them with any silly questions. I cross the boulevard to another pâtissier and on the window is posted a little white paper with a stamp on it saying the store and the products it sales are certified by the Beth Din of Paris for the Pessa’h. I guess I’ll have to put my croissant craving on hold for a few days.