NEEDLING

A FOOL'S HOPE

I did it. I did it. I turned in my resignation letter. I'm so happy about it. It's as if there's a world of possibilities in front of me. A world of potential adventures. I know, it's the hope of fools... I try not to think about it. I'm simply enjoying the fact that in two weeks from now, I have no clue what I'll do. That in a little more than a month, I'll no longer be in this studio, that I'll give it back to my landlord - after seven years almost! That in front of me there is a big blank, a big black hole, a big lack of future. This feeling right there, right now, right when the decision has been taken and the action to put the decision in action has also been taken and that there is no turning back. I love this moment. It doesn't last long, sure, and eventually reality falls back heavier than a dead elephant. Who cares? This moment is worth all the reality in the form of all the dead elephants falling on my head. It's as if there is in front of me a life... one to be lived... opened up... when one is stuck in material slavery - apartment, job, bank account, money, material responsibilities - then one knows exactly where one is going, how one is going to get old and die... when you give all of it up, even if you know that to survive in our world you'll have to eventually gain all of it back once again, then life in this naked state becomes magic once again. I think possibly that magic only comes from not knowing where the future will take you. Magic comes from having all of your wordly possessions fit into a small back pack. I know... I know... the magic has a tendency to dissipate whenever you have no place to sleep, you have no money in your wallet, your credit cards have been blocked, and it's getting close to night time... I know... but right now it feels good... and I've never claimed to be anything but a fool...

HAVING A QUICK DRINK BEFORE CLOCKING IN

Was just getting home from work and called Sean up responding to his message on my telephone machine to tell him that I would be checking in early this evening being that I gotta work early at the hotel tomorrow opening the house and closing it basically playing the aubergiste without the pay or the glory… when I decided to go on outside and grab a quick beer before nightfall.

A beer in a bar, that being one hundred percent different than a beer at home, both being good for what they are, for different reasons, having their pros and cons, both being enjoyable and absolutely necessary for the survival of the species.

I loly’d on down to the Follies… the Zorba having switched gear from Ringard to hip electronic cool people and in so doing raised the price of a beer, the Giraffe Puzzle being too far away and up the hill for just a single drink, the Bar-Hotel having been closed down by the city – with a socialist mayor no less – the Deux Chapeaux being a place I prefer to go accompanied – also it’s up the hill and then down the hill which is okay for going there but harder for coming back home – , the Timbeau Elephant, once my regular drinking hole, being too dark and rough drunk for a single drink… I was left with but a single choice, Les Follies.

So up the Belleville way I went to check in at the bar and order a demis from the local Follies bartender. Chairs spreading out onto the sidewalk three rows thick with people flowing in and out of the place. After my second glass, or the second half of my two part pint, a band of French rockers started playing. They were good. A mix of punk, rock-n-roll (they even did a French version of Jim Morisson’s “Whiskey Bar” though that wasn’t so good…), rai, Spanish guitar, all loaded up with some good sarcastic lyricism a la French. The usual musical cocktail for these parts, but these fellows were beating the rhythm good and healthy.

I was thinking. Things are good for me here in Belleville. Like I like it to be. Good mix of people. All kinds, all colors, all types, multitude of languages, all ages. You got your twenties crowd, sure, but that’s not all… others also, older others, and younger others on the terrace with moms and dads. Open French-windows out onto the sidewalk. People coming in and out. Kids running around. Rockers rocking shouting sarcastic lyrics. People drinking beers, shooting pastis, smoking fags. Nobody hiding from nobody. That’s just the way it is, the way you see it. No showing of I.D.’s to get into dark closed-in places so you might have the right to have a drink shamefully while cops roll around in their copmobiles on the streets just waiting for you to forget you can’t take a tall boy outside… get yourself thrown into the paddywagon. Closed windows, closed doors, walls shut in and confined into plastic air conditioning…

Here nobody cares. The place is open, come in if you want, lean against the car parked on the street if you want, loiter about on and off the sidewalk, bring your own booze as long as you don’t sit on the café’s chairs, or just continue your way to the next place if that's your demon... Be Free... Shit…

Long Live Belleville!

PROCRASTINATING AT THE NINE BILLIARDS

Here I am back at my office. Today is one of them days where they don’t shake my hand, where they don’t remember me, where I have never walked into their bar. I don’t know why that happens sometimes, but it does. Maybe it’s that I’ve started bringing a computer in here, or maybe it’s because they’ve somehow decided that I was an American… maybe they’ve seen my screen and realized I wrote in English, or they remember from a couple years back when I’ve brought English speaking friends in here. Whatever it is, this is one of those days where they don’t like me and where they’re going to make me wait for my crème. I ordered my crème as I walked in as I always do, yet I haven’t heard the cream-steaming machine go on or off yet… and I’ve had time to sit down, turn my computer on, and write this whole paragraph. I’ll let it go a few minutes then I’ll have to get back up and go to the bar and re-order. Maybe they don’t want my business anymore. I would be real sorry for that. I don't come in here as often as I did a while back... I've been in this neighborhood more than six years. I still come in here minimum once a week, or once every week and a half. That’s not enough to be considered a regular anymore I guess.

I got up and went up to the bar. They had forgotten all about me. My coffee was sitting on the machine. It should be nice and cold about now. I’m just a little paranoid I guess… (I won’t talk about last night, but I haven’t felt that out of place, that ill at ease, that claustrophobic in a long time… and I haven’t gotten over it… plus there was a Gabin movie on last night, with Ginsbourg…)

I should call MP today and see if her writing assignment is making progress. Which leads me to my own assignment, before I start thinking about hers, I should think about mine.

Those two American women again… example of one of our many “conversations”…

“Are the keyboards different here?”
“Yes… we use AZERTY, where as you use QWERTY keyboards…”
“…” Grimace.
“Different country, you know, different language, different needs, different evolution of things… even keyboards…”
“Why?”
“That’s just the way it is.”
“Why can’t you have normal keyboards, I mean the letters are all in the wrong places. And the commas, and the dots too. I just thought I was going crazy. Why don’t you have normal keyboards?”
“Well, we do have normal keyboards, they’re just different, that’s all.”
“I couldn’t even write an email, I was going nuts… why can’t you have the same keyboards as us?”
“Personally, I prefer the AZERTY keyboard…”
“The what?”
“The keyboard we have in France.”
“…” Stunned, unbelieving…
“Well, for accents and stuff… and I’m used to it.”
“Yeah… I guess it’s for all the different letters and stuff.”
“…”
“I was just all confused, that’s all.”
“We use the same alphabet in French as in English, you know that right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the letters are placed differently on the keyboard but they’re the same letters.”
“You use the American alphabet?”
“Actually, it’s the Latin alphabet.”
“Oh…”

Okay… I’m being a little rough, but that conversation did take place more or less as I’ve put it down. They never asked if we use the so called American alphabet but they actually believed we used a different alphabet in French. How they thought that when the conversation was going on about keyboards, and the different placing of letters – the same letters on both keyboards – I don’t know. I was a little perturbed myself during our talk to have to tell them that the French and the English languages both use the same alphabet. Actually, now that I think about it, it makes sense. If they thought French was written with a completely different lettering system than English, it would indeed be quite weird that all keyboards in the “English” alphabet should be arranged differently than they are in the States (Do all English speaking countries use the QWERTY keyboard?). I’m starting to uncover their logic.

Sometimes the trick to understand others is Not to use the logic which governs our lives to understand their words and actions, but to try and uncover their logic, as foreign as it might be to us, so that we may use their logic to understand their thought process and thus their words and actions. If we don’t understand that much about the person in front of us, what they say and do may and will probably seem completely absurd or rude or both. There’s an idea there, I’m sure of it.

Back to my assignment. I was reworking this short story I wrote last year… I was also trying to rewrite a short screenplay but I couldn’t do it… just couldn’t get excited about it…

I need to move to a cabin in the forest or on the beach or in the mountains or somewhere where there isn’t any internet connection, where there are no television channels, or just one in Spanish or something with Latino soap-operas diffused all day long. But how could I live without minimum one movie theater with regular projections? I could, I’m sure of it.

POOR MAN'S HALF MOON TOMATO & RICE

Whole garlic not crushed, simply skinned, frying at the bottom of a wok. Salted. Then I ad whole tomatoes, small size but not cherry size, from which I’ve merely cut the dildo off. Don’t know what it’s called, the tip where the tomato was held to the branch. I fry them with the garlic without crushing the tomatoes or cutting them. Massalla, black and red pepper. I fry all that good and well, flipping the tomatoes around so they don’t burn. I do that for a while. Then I pour in a small glass of water, lower the fire, and cover the wok. Bring it to a slow boil. The trick is that I don’t want to break the tomatoes. I’ve got some rice ready on the side. And I’d like to get me a plate of rice and just place the tomatoes next to my rice. There’s the sauce of the tomatoes and the garlic. Far from revolutionary cooking, but I’m hungry, and I decided the cauliflower was not eatable. So the tomatoes, also a little outdated, and the garlic is basically all I had to work with. Plus a little zucchini I’m gonna steam now. Be very careful when taking out tomatoes from the wok so as not to break them. We want to keep them whole. I place them in a bowl and cover them. When done with the zucchini, don’t throw the juice away. This is a given and should not even be written down. That’s what you use if you want a little wetness on your rice, and that’s what you use tomorrow to make more rice, or to make a sauce, or to dip your bread into. But whatever you do, don’t throw the juice away.

What I did was put a lot of rice on my plate, place the tomatoes carefully half moon around part of the rice on the edge of the plate, place the zucchini on top of the rice right next to the tomatoes, the whole garlic in front of the tomatoes, and poured the sauce, which had become a thin gravy, right on top of the tomatoes. Not bad at all for a thrown together little meal. Goes to prove you don’t necessarily need meat to make a good plate.

TAKE A WALK TO THE LOCAL BAR

A chunk of cauliflower, about half a head, has been wilting away on my desk now for the last few days. It seems to still be part of the comestible realm of produce, though it should probably be cooked rather than be eaten raw. Lots of hot spices to kill any possible little worms or unwanted little germs. Uhm…

Whity came from Brittany, France
Hitch-hiked her way across the milky way
Ducked horny truckers on the way
Trimmed her leaves and then brushed herself
She says, Hey babe
Take a WOK on the wild side
She said, Hey honey
Take a WOK on the wild side…

We all choose to see what we want to see. If we don’t like what we see, we merely have to close our eyes, think about what we want to see, and reopen our eyes to see what we’re seeing with our new interpretation so we are now seeing what we want to see. Self-induced denial of our direct surrounding environment by projection of self-induced images from the back of our heads. In this manner the world can be, and most importantly, can remain a pinky peachy pretty place where all is going in the right, towards an ever better and more understanding place in the sun. God Bless.

WOW... I feel better. I need a drink now.

EARLY MORNING GETTING READY FOR A NEW DAY

Back at my coffee, my computer, my dirty studio. Scrubbed the toilet bowl yesterday. Slept most the afternoon, trying to recover from my fourteen day stint at the hotel. Might even get some laundry done this morning. Asked my boss what he thought about the end of my contract coming up in three weeks. He said he thought I would stay, that he was interested in me staying at the hotel. I then asked him how much time I had to think about it. When should I tell him I’m staying or I’m leaving. Two weeks before the end of said contract, was the answer. I told him I’m thinking about going back to the States. What a time to go back State-side. And to Texas no less. Like a German-American going back to Berlin in the early 1930’s. Obviously one can’t make those kind of comparisons. Different shit-hole all together, shit-hole nonetheless. Back at my coffee…

Got a writing assignment for my writer’s group. Was so numbed into stupid-hood by the never-ending hours at the hotel… I’ve been home sleeping every single minute out of the hotel trying to recover from… for example: two American women in their fifties from Texas right outside of Dallas, asking me, wearing black felt berets with pictures of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe emblazoned in gold colored threading on the back… walking around with plastic cups filled with red wine… they were asking me if the statue in the middle of the Place de la Republic represented the French Independence day. Maybe you’re mistaking the column in the middle of Place de la Bastille, I proposed, which stands where the Bastille prison used to sit, and which represents the taking of the Bastille during the French Revolution. As far as an independence day, France has been an independent state for way too long to have such a day. Ohhhh…. gulp, gulp… plastic cups plank plock in the trash bin… I’ve had to put up with them for three days. Three mornings where I sent up perfectly nicely decorated and arranged breakfast trays. That was so nice, my god, they told me the first morning after the first tray went up to their room, that we took a picture. Did they give the maid a tip for bringing said tray to their room? No. Did they give me a tip for putting said tray together and making sure all was in order? No. Did they then come down to the reception area and talk my ears off asking me a million silly questions? Yes. Did I keep smiling throughout, trying my best to give half coherent answers to half gurgled up questions? Yes. And no, I’m not describing myself as the good guy here, I was hopping for a tip, I was doing this because I figured there was a pay-off, that doesn’t make me the good guy, that makes me the cheap materialistic, calculating waiter.

Back at my coffee, which is getting cold… Clementine the maid was laughing at me when those two American sisters from Texas kept hanging out in the reception area. They’re hitting on you, she kept saying, the thin one, I think she’s eying you. Drop it, Clementine, they’re just American versions of you. They won’t stop talking. That’s all they do is talk. It doesn’t matter what they say, as long as useless meaningless noise is coming out of their traps. That shut her up for a couple of minutes. Then she said, you’re mean, Francois, I’m not like that. Then she went pouting up to her rooms, and left me thank god by myself.

MONDAY AFTERNOON AFTER A FIVE HOUR NAP

This is my first time off since last week sometimes about a million years ago. Five days one after the next doing twelve hour shifts at my favorite hotel. Was so tired I was having a hard time counting the register and things like that. Yesterday, I almost blew a fuse whenever I negotiated three rooms for four nights with six Turkish men. The negotiations lasted forty five minutes of arms waving, yelling, explications, last prices, won’t go lower… they visited the rooms in questions several times. The negotiations started out with two men, and slowly as time went on took place with all six… they kept going back outside and grabbing one of their fellow travelers to come in and join in the debates. One fellow, the one who spoke the best English, kept putting his hands together looking at me saying, “I’ll talk to them, I’ll talk to them, it’s good, this is good… but you know, we are six and we all have to agree.” Then another one would ad, “Democracy. That’s what we get for democracy, nobody can decide on nothing.”

Earlier yesterday...

This woman in her early thirties came in with a small luggage, pulling it along on its tiny wheels. She was tall, pretty, and looked like an airline hostess.

“I’d like a room till about nine tonight,” it was late morning.
“Sure… I’ll give you a little price, is this for one person or two?”
“One.”
“No problem.”

I gave her a nice room on the fifth floor.

Six in the afternoon, thus about seven hours later, she hadn’t called me for anything, hadn’t come downstairs or left her room, a man shows up with a pizza in one hand and a bottle of coke in the other.

“This is for room 54, I believe, a Mrs. So&So.”
“Sure,” I say and call up to the woman’s room, totally calculating the man for a pizza delivery boy. “Hello, mam, your pizza has arrived…”
“Good… but I certainly hope the pizza is accompanied by my husband…”
I hold the phone and look at the man whom I had taken for a pizza delivery boy, “You’re the husband?”
“Yes.”

I tell the woman that he’ll be right up. I’m all red, really embarrassed.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I look at him for the first time. Thin, tall fellow, but definitely in his late thirties, and not a pizza delivery boy look. He’s embarrassed as well. I try to catch my mistake. “You didn’t say anything when you came in… how could I know?”

THE LAST TEN MOVIES I’VE SEEN AT THE THEATER FROM THE LAST TO THE FIRST

La Mémoire du tueur (De Zaak Alzheimer) de Erik van Looy
On this second viewing, the clichés of the genre really popped out at me. I didn’t mind them, though. Like so many other things donned automatically negative, clichés aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just a quick way in story-telling to get from A to C zapping by B. As long as that’s not all there is. And this movie has got so much else going for it, like Jan Decleir for example, who has got one great gueule, that I for one can forgive a few clichés.
ALLOCINE
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La Grande séduction de Jean-François Pouliot
Saw this one with AMK, I only mention this because I usually go to the movies alone, and she kept elbowing me every time I laughed a little too hard. I’m all for this working class / regional sentimental comedy stuff, wish there was more of it. Fun movie.
ALLOCINE
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Mariages ! de Valérie Guignabodet
Easy laugh. Nothing spectacular. At a wedding everybody drinks a little much and all the hidden truths / secrets et cetera start coming out. Who has slept with whom kind of story. Nothing new, no great twists… easy entertainment…
ALLOCINE
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Coffee and Cigarettes de Jim Jarmusch
Jarmusch called his buddies over the years, put them in various coffee shops and bars around coffee cups and too many cigarettes, and then he got his camera crew to shoot them, to see what might happen. Sometimes it works, most of the time I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing in this theater watching these people. Certainly not a movie, and hardly a series of short films. What’s the point? Took me half the movie to get into the format and not be angry at it. But who am I to critique?
ALLOCINE
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Metropolis de Fritz Lang
First time for everything. Need to see it again before they take it out of the theatres. The kind of film which needs several viewings and several years of digesting. I saw it after six hours at the hotel on only a few hours of sleep, and the constant music added to the dreamy images kept putting me in a trance, I’d close my eyes and the movie mixed itself with images in my head… sometimes it was me with those machines… and what an android! They don’t make them like that anymore…
ALLOCINE
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La Mémoire du tueur (De Zaak Alzheimer) de Erik van Looy
I like the film-noir / detective genre. And it’s rare that good quality films come out in this genre. Typical two cop team. One is a sports fan, a little trigger happy, the other is an intellectual who wants to understand why. They fight the system which works against them. The killer is always one step ahead. The killer is the best part.
ALLOCINE
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Le Convoyeur de Nicolas Boukhrief
Since I’ve seen Irréversible, I’m a little weary about going to see a Dupontel movie. No problem here, classic good guy turned bad guy looking for revenge. Very violent in the sense that all the characters are regular joes doing a dangerous yet regular job. Violence is easier to watch when it’s cartoon-like and we know the characters aren’t real in any way, like in Kill Bill I, but these guys could be any burned out blue collar workers. Lots of greys and blues. Cement and parking lots. Joints and beers. Cold hard movie
ALLOCINE
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The Brown bunny de Vincent Gallo
I really liked the van, wish I had one just like it. I could have done without the movie, though. Who gave who the money to make this? How does this kind of stuff get distributed? Internationally? Gets accepted into the biggest festivals? Who paid who how much? There’s the real story. Cause there certainly isn’t any story on the screen worth two hours of my time anywhere in this movie.
ALLOCINE
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Monty Python’s Life of Brian de Terry Jones
First time I’ve seen any Monty Python on the big screen. I want to see more, More, MORE.
ALLOCINE
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Les Dames du bois de Boulogne de Robert Bresson
What’s at stake here is a little passé. Anyway... I was enjoying this movie anyway, but this lady sitting behind me kept kneeing the back of my seat. I looked at her with those stop jerking my seat please look, to which when I turned back to the movie she told me in an uppity pretentious voice, “you should learn to sit properly, young man.” It took all the reserve I had to not turn around and tell her what I thought of her remark. It took a lot of energy to be able to concentrate back on the movie. One of reasons I like to see movies in the morning or in the early afternoon when there are little or nobody in the theatres. I was half sprawled out on my seat, covered with my jacket, as it was cold in the theatre, but there was nobody in front of me that I was bothering with my knees.
ALLOCINE
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VIRUS AND CONFUSED STATE

A new wave of computer virus has invaded the virtual world. I was not spared. This last Saturday, I fought tooth and nails, keyboard and pop-up blues, trying to save my machine from the big bad wolf of lala land, the bed bugs that lay their eggs not underneath your skin but inside the very virtual life-line of your machine making you their unbeknownst slaves and executioners of more virtual pirate action infecting your friends and family attached to you through this new generation post-birth umbilical cord linking all of us to the new mother Big Bertha, the virtual goddess loaded with virtual cannonballs created by the machination and perversity of our modern age holding a siege around the fortress of our soul...

When one does not know what one is talking about then one should keep quiet and not speak out loud and unclear about what one does not understand… I disagree. Speak, my child, my fool, my irate virtual glob-trotter. I am the fool with the electronic bedbugs, fighting them as best as I can, not knowing what I am doing.

We live in a world where nothing is quite ever real. I look out past the metal bars outside my window – no, I do not live in a prison, I live in a big city and my window gives directly onto a sort of fake courtyard to which there is no access except from the public clinic underneath my studio, to whom this courtyard belongs and the reason for which I have bars on my window… supposedly to keep the clinic people out, but I believe also to keep me in – I look out past these white painted metal bars (useless detail… does it matter that they are white, rusted, and dirty?) and I see across the street the same buildings I’ve been staring out for the last six years, windows through which I cannot see because of the reflection of the sun, but from which they – whoever they are – can see me, and have been watching me now for all these years. I didn’t always have a job as I do now, and I would sometimes spend my whole day, several of them at a time, weeks, staring out of my window into nothing. More often than not drinking myself to death, dancing around my studio naked or in my shorts, trying to write bad poetry, reciting them over and over again trying to decode their hidden truth if there was any truth to be found, usually not, and putting them down on my screen. Mostly, though, I sat staring out my window wondering what the hell I was doing in my prison. I even tried to write a short story about it. I’ve written it and re-written it several times and it remains like what I’m doing here: a bad piece of writing. Because I misunderstand what the non-see-through windows have to tell me. I’m sure of this.

Hum... re-reading myself I realize I say absolutely nothing. I start saying a few different things, and end up talking about something else not finishing anything that I started. Oh well...

I sat down in front of this machine wanting to write about Paris. How I feel about Paris, what it feels like to live here being non-French French (I’ve never been anything but French as far as the law is concerned, but I grew up as an illegal alien in the Texas bible belt…) and whether or not I feel as if I’m a Parisian after more than six years living here, even if I constantly misspell EVERY word in French I attempt to write down. Somehow, I never got around to writing about that subject at all, not even a little hint… I’ll do that later... the trouble is, is that I don't know what the hell I was trying to say at all...