Saturday, March 27, 2010

It's Wine O'clock Somewhere, or Commence Chapter 30

I think it's about time to tell the tale of how I rang out the twenties and brought in the thirties with a costume party, some live jazz, and a new song to be added to my Christmas Eve playlist of favorites.

First up: Masquerade, themed "famous pairs." Here's Pull The Prick Out and me, getting ready. I'm surprised this came out at all clear--we'd had a shit week and lots of wine by 7.00 Friday night. (Photo taken at 7.01 Friday night.)



We packed a (really large) backpack full of alcohol and trekked over to Squash's apartment, where every single stick of furniture had been removed to make way for what seemed like 800 people in about 400 square feet of space.

Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues: We Hate Illinois Nazis

My personal favorite (or second favorite, right after the Blues Brothers, of course): One person as both Sonny AND Cher!
SonnyAndCher

PTPO made amazing (also read: really f*ing strong) concoctions of tequila, lime and something else and quite possibly a fourth ingredient but buggered if I can remember anything about anything.

And that's all I really have to say about that, I think.

Anyhoo, six days later was the big Three-Oh, which started out nicely by me sleeping off staying awake until 5am the night before reading Diamond Age and listening to French news podcasts (omg who AM I!)

Then it was off to the Paris mosque for hammam, where I sat in the second-hottest room (I got one foot in the third room and thought it was going to melt off my jambe right on the spot) and sweated and warmed my way up from the inside for hour upon glorious hour. This was followed by a spot of thé à la menthe in the dimly lit welcome room surrounded by murmured conversations of the other ladies-in-repose and the white noise of water running through the fountain in the middle of the pillared, vaulted space.
Ahhhhh.

To fill in the hour or so before dinner, Pain Quotidien came to the rescue with a bowl of creamy coffee and a brioche aux raisins.
Ahhhhh.

Dinner was a DELICIOUS salad niçoise, bottle of wine (it's wine o'clock all day on birthdays, I'm just sayin'), and a chocolate yumminess for dessert at a cute little restaurant near Ile St Louis. Squash, PTPO and I segued to the next event by strolling up Blvd St Michel to a jazz club, where we cheered on a group of cute old Frenchmen playing New Orleans style tunes.

Le Petit Journal Saint Michel

And then, of course, no self-respecting birthday celebration is complete without crepes aux nutella!

Best. Crepes. EVAH.

And the next day, wrapped in one of my favorite expletives and a short story about a toothbrush by way of apology on being a day late, the one and only DT, known in some nefarious circles as the Ramblin' Mand'lin, emailed me a song he'd composed for my big day. (N.B.: I would never stoop so low as to beg ask him to do this for me. Nor would I follow up to give him a week's notice-reminder out of paranoia he'd forgotten.)

It is, ironically and yet undeniably aptly, titled "It Is What It Is." I push play, hear the first bare notes of mandolin and see ... 

... winter, the darkening skies, the chill wind with a spattering of cold rain, the hunched-shoulder half-run to your front door as you struggle with your errands-bags and finally manage to shut the door behind you and lean against it with trembling knees in relief of the warmth you can now feel seeping by degrees into deeper and deeper layers of your every cell. You might have just had a shit day, but right now it all falls away and you take a deep breath and unzip your coat and your sleepy lazy cats curled up with the sleepy lazy mastiff-named-Murdoch raise their heads (b/c they can't be bothered to move from their comfy spot on the doggy tummy and as much as the doggy loves you she's so excited that the cats are hanging out with her she doesn't want to move either) and see you beeline for the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. (Was that a half-smile you let slip when you decided on vanilla roobois with a spot of agave nectar?) 

Putting away groceries and other things you had to go out in the cold for before the blessed relief of warm chez toi, the snow that held off as rain all day finally starts to fall intermittently in small, goopy-wet flakes, nothing too serious. You are a bit melancholy, but not quite sure why, and yet it's not the melancholy that turns downward into depression, just the melancholy that, when it dissipates (which it's sure to do when Murdoch and the kitties finally rub against your legs after admitting they love you too much to leave you alone in the kitchen and you remember there's a Castle marathon on TV tonight), leaves you feeling even more acutely the happiness that was lurking just under the 'choly. You have miles to go before you sleep, but these next few miles will be friggin fantastic and lazy--miles of cozying up in your favorite big sweater cooking ratatouille and Trader Joe's cornbread.

There's even a perfect kK tangent at the end of the song. You think it's over, and then just as you're mentally prepared for the next song on the list to start, there's a little afterthought that pops up and catches you off guard in a "yar, nope, not finished yet, there's plenty more good stuff where that came from ... whatcha think, will I leave you hanging this time, too?" way, and then it's done, nothing left it wants to say. And leaves you to retreat inward to process your own thoughts for a while. Or screw the inner monologue and LET'S GO DANCING.

There's no denying it's a perfect addition to my Christmas Eve playlist. The imagery might change with another hearing; there are no words, so it's perfect for personal, depending-on-my-mood interpretation, which as you know is the ONLY WAY I ROLL.

Now I am going to pour a generous splash of cognac (happiness-in-a-can-baby!) into a glass that was once used to house the deliciousness we call nutella (happiness-in-a-can-baby!) but has been emptied (probably in one go, by me), rinsed out and recycled as part of a glasses set that, without the nutella labels, really does look like a stack of regular ol' water glasses. 

Before

After

Once that incredibly arduous task is done, I am going to sit back, relax, and watch the rest of Supernatural season one. Dubbed. In Chinese. OK, just kidding, in French.

Anyway, now that I'm 30 my life experiences and level of bizarreness have maybe quite possibly developed into something resembling inner wisdom. I don't really know what that means, but as les Blues would say:

It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.

kK

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Wastin' Away: Part Deux

So I've been wanting to go to Mont Saint Michel since I was a cute, innocent étudiante in Aix-en-Provence. (How many years ago? LOL) It's a little difficult to get there because there's no direct train or bus or whatever, so you basically need access to a car in order to even think about going.

Saturday afternoon at le château it was announced that we were going to take a road trip to ... yar, MONT SAINT MICHEL for Sunday mass! woohoo!

Again, I'm just going to let the pictures do the talking:














Surrounded by intermittent quicksand (apparently someone dies every year on the pilgrimage to this place, what the waht!), this churchy fortress spent time as a prison after the French Revolution, and you can still see the pulley-thingy that was used to wheel up food to the prioners.

My favorite room, of course, was the scriptorium, where the monks used to laboriously hand copy books 'n' stuff. It's empty now, but I filled in the room weird-half-animated-movie style with all the necessary deets: 8 thick wooden desks spread with stacks of books and piles of loose paper, with one monk at each bent over in their brown woolen robes and ink-stained fingers leaving streaks on their cheeks when they absentmindedly reach up to scratch a faint itch. It's silent but for the crackling fire at each end of the enormous room, a scratching of feather-pen on parchment and an occasional cough. Although seriously, maybe those monks sweating over a manuscript just let out a scream now and then, getting to the last of the page and then find some typo (hando? lol!) and were all, "sheeeet, I gotta start over! Again! For the third time! Whatves, I'm just gonna leave it in, no one will notice it should read 'celebrate.'"


It felt like the monastery went on forever and ever ... all the different levels and beautiful cavernous rooms ... it was quite fantastic. The music was awesome (love me some organ tunes), and even though I heart the morbid, I was still freaked out by a darkly-hooded monk slo-mo pulling a fat rope attached to the somberly-ringing bell. muaaahhaahahaha!


Thus concludes kK's quest to fulfill a long-held dream visit, and also the weekend Wastin' Away Again in GreatBigChateau-Ville.

kK

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Wastin' away again in Great Big Chateau -Ville

Spent a weekend in Bretagne back in February. Squash's roommate Carole invited us to spend a couple of days at the family country home where her family and friends go for la chasse with big guns and cute outfits. (Remember that fresh Thanksgiving turkey? Yar.)

Well, I'm going to let the pictures do the talking because I just simply don't have the words (I know, shocker):
(nope, not yet, these are just the old stables...)

(getting closer...)

(et voilà!)

(et voilà, again...)

I walked up the Grand Staircase to the Great Hall that lead to our chambers (there's no way I can just say 'bedroom,' that's too plebe), whereupon I immediately had literary déjà vu* and an overwhelming urge to run around in a white dressing gown calling "Rochester! Darling Rochester!" or at the very least grab a candelabra and jump in a Neil Simon screenplay.
Grand Staircase

Great Hall

Dining room
Here is the view from the bathroom. Let me repeat that: This is the view from THE BATHROOM.


Oh yeah, and this would be me, slipping behind the mirror to the hidden door that opens into a PRIVATE CHAPEL. It was so beautiful and peaceful I almost wanted to get baptized. 

And of course, no self-respecting chateau is complete without the most important room of all:

La bibliothèque!

And no self-respecting bibliothèque, of course, is complete without...
Who's that poser in the horizontal striped shirt?

...a Santa Claus-sized fireplace!

That night there was Operation Dinner-Out with the chasse party at a Carole-dubbed "dive bar" restaurant. LOL. When we got to the eatery Squash and I simultaneously squared off and gave Carole a "Pshaw riiiiight, dive bar! You ain't even SEEN no dive bar, girlie!" look as we waltzed into a cozy, clean, well-lit room with long tables and proper upright dinner chairs. But really, if all it takes for a resto to make the dive list is a foosball table and homemade cidre (holy crap happiness-in-a-can-baby! Sorry Strongbow, you have been replaced by an unnamed-but-much-celebrated bubbly apple-y goodness from Bretagne), then I will hang the neon sign above the door myself.

Anyway, during dinner Squash and I kept noticing the same distinctive, non-wedding-band type gold ring on the ring fingers of a majority of the guys in the party. After several whispered guesses ("It's one 'a them Knights Templar fraternity thingies!" "It's a secret society where they do pseudo-scientific experiments on stolen dead bodies!") she shushed me by pouring a bit more liquid gold distraction into my glass and just asked the dude across from us what the hell it was all about. He obligingly explained that it was his family crest and showed us the design. And, not quite understanding, we were like, "So, everyone wears one of these things?" And he gave us a funny look, like, sorry-dudes-this-is-going-to-sound-snobby-but-oh-well-it's-the-truth, and said:

"Oui, la noblesse."

...

Oh.

And then we all trooped into someone's humble manor and stood around the fireplace drinking champagne and eating nibbles of nougat, where I was drunk enough to be hilarious in French. (That's right kK, they were laughing with you.) I somehow managed to keep a conversation going en français about Thomas Jefferson, someone's American great-grandmother, and why I like animals better than people (just kidding, like I'd ever talk about someone's great-grandmother in a roomful of people who like to hunt) before collapsing into bed Princess And The Pea-style with a hot water bottle and 800 blankets to keep out the draft.

And thus was spent part of Saturday wastin' away in a Great Big Chateau. Stay tuned for Sunday, if you're really good.

kK
*Literary déjà vu? Really? Um, NERD ALERT level raised to hot orangey red. (Also, can I get a round of applause for Peter Sellers as the Chinese Guy? KthxBai.)

Thursday, March 11, 2010

MISSING: HAVE YOU SEEN ... dog poop?

As the TGV sped Frenchily down the track heading on a southeasterly course, I sat in the backwards-facing seat and felt a strange sense of going backandforward in time. Squash and I were headed to Aix-en-Provence and I was a bit nervous to return to the scene of the crime--the crime, of course, being my semester abroad during my junior year of college. NINE YEARS AGO.

The TGV pulled into the station, and it was 3-2-1 Go Time. There was no fanfare, no bolt of lightening that struck the memory banks. Nothing looked familiar, and I was uneasily starting to wonder if we'd even gotten off at the right stop.

Bus into town, follow the crowd to what I was vaguely recalling to be the short walk to the city center.

Is that the old fruit stand I used to pass on my way to the bus?

Slowly, like one of those old lights that needs to warm up before it becomes fully bright, a memory of me walking with a suitcase in tow down this very street starts to solidify in my mind, and I feel the first twinges of memories long-buried begin to stir and rise from the depths of my murky, experience-laden conscious.

Time seemed to slow down, and then very nearly stopped completely when we got to la Rotonde fountain at Cours Mirabeau. I took in the winter-bare sycamore trees lining la rue, the pale yellow and faded white of the ancient buildings lit up by the bright sun against the pure blue of the sky. I gasped out loud, not quite believing what I was seeing--was it really the same city? Had I never really seen this?

After half-heartedly trying to find the hotel (*FAIL*) we were just too hungry to continue wandering and jumped into the first café we stumbled on. After an over-priced and forgettable salad, we found a city map outside of the tourist office and I led us down the Cours and over the ankle-wobbling cobblestones towards our home-for-the-next-two-days. A few paces down the street and I heard the sound of a jackhammer.

WHAM! I flashback so suddenly my eyes and mouth snap open at the same moment and I start laughing. There was construction all along the Cours when I was here as a student. I remember weaving in and out of the metal fences for 5 months, dodging cars and flying concrete dust as the construction guys did whatever it was they were hired to do to fix the road. I look ahead to see if there is still, nine years later, metal fencing and men-at-work. And you know what? YES, THERE IS. HAHA! Not nearly as much, only a spot here and there, but holy crap, really? Talk about dragging out a job. Nine years and they're still not done! (OK, so maybe they're on to a different job by now, but I think it's way funnier to consider the fact that they might actually have been doing the same job for nine years. COME ON. That's hilarious.)

We turn right and head up rue d'Italie, and I'm merrily standing around as Squash snaps away to capture the quaint street and fabulous light. It looks familiar in that "I know I've been here before but enh, it's probably just another one of those cute streets" way, until I pass a little grocery store that triggers another dredging.


I start to get a little uneasy as we pass a bar called O'Neals...man, didn't I use to drink there after class some nights? My feet slow and stop of their own accord as we see a church spire off to the right.
Rue Cardinale. No. Friggin. Way.


 15 Rue Cardinale, the address of the one-room (not counting the office or the bathroom) Vanderbilt In France school-away-from-school.

After I started breathing again (I mean crap, I haven't been here in almost a decade...I'm feeling super old, and the memories are just weird since it's a part of my life I haven't really thought too much about, at least not in depth, for so long it's more like a dream than something that actually happened) we continue on Operation CSI: Aix-en-Provence.


My god, I had completely forgotten the sunlit beauty of the old Roman town.



And the fountains! Every other turn in the anything-but-straight roads reveals another fountain. 




I didn't think the markets could be any prettier than what I see every day in Paris, but I was WRONG.

The colors were resplendent-er and the smells smellier than I can even imagine describing in words.

**kK Tangent 624,842**
I would like to kill my camera: I had the perfect shot of me standing and looking "dumbly" up at the spot where the pigeon squirted out an egg onto my arm nine years ago near the market at the Hotel de Ville. Yes, picture my jaunty younger self leading Willis on a tour of my beautiful city, when tout d'un coup, a pigeon leaned its back end over the edge of a building and instead of laying its egg in its nest decided it would be more productive to send it crashing wetly onto the unsuspecting arm of the nearest passerby below.

And no, you don't see that everyday.

Since we didn't have a Grissom along during that tour, there was no photographic evidence documenting proof of this crazy fatass pigeon's terrorist attempt. So I took pains to find the old crime scene, posed myself in a wonderfully doesn't-look-staged-at-all open-mouthed gaze of "confusion" up at the offending group of pigeons clustered on the ledge above me. And my wonderful, cooperative camera decided to reject that photo like last year's celebrity charity and is now telling me that "no image data" exists for this frame. This is what I got, so just imagine me in the grey area on the left in a horizontal striped shirt, head titled back and gazing up, mouth open:

MUTHAF-----.

**possible end to kK Tangent 624,842**

As part of Operation CSI: AeP (something I actually never did when I lived here, lol!), we followed the signs UP an interminable hill to Cezanne's studio. It was as if time stood still here, and yet at the same time strangely showed its old age. I absorbed the little details: an old jacket that looked as if Cezanne had plunked it over the chair just yesterday-yet-also-100-years-ago. A set of fake fruit, set up for a still life that could be painted tomorrow, except I've seen that very pose in Cezanne exhibits at the Met. A fissured skull grinned secretively beside a short bookshelf full of really old books about painting. Cezanne was there...I don't know how, or why, or what the hell was going on...it was supposed to be just a sterile, museum-y room, but as soon as I stepped my big clod-hoppers into the breezy loft I had to collect my wits after being scattered by the bemused spirit of Art as she gently smacked me upside the head for being arrogantly unprepared for facing the lingering humanity of the departed artist.


From this very room he gave us a glimpse of what he saw from of his wall-of-windows:


Cezanne's Mont Sainte Victoire

I remember our class took a trip together to hike this mountain...like it was yesterday, I felt the cool air in my bones and saw the intermittent blue dots of flowers beginning to push through the stubbornly lingering vestiges of winter in the rocky earth. 

Quite possibly the funniest thing about past-life-Aix (apart from my grandmother calling me at 4am the night of my 21st birthday as I semi-smugly convinced myself that I was convincing her I was sober) was all the dog poop. Piles, and yet more piles, every few steps. Actually, the piles themselves weren't as funny as the shoe heel marks making little glidey streaks sometimes as much as 3 or 4 inches through the brown mess. In each slide mark you could practically hear the poor fellow's leftover scream GODDAMMIT ZUT ALORS I AM SLIDING IN LA MERDE DE CHIEN.

But no more! The city is as clean as whistle, or very nearly. I was suitably impressed. Almost as impressed as I was with the FOOOOOOOOOD. PIZZA! TAPAS! And I drank cervoise every night! I think that might be my most favoritest drink, ever. I love my 86-year-old-man club, but in between tumblers of whiskey bring on the beer/white wine/citron mixture! Happiness-in-a-can-baby!!

I never did find old haunts like Le Mistral (the one real dancing club in town, although that never stopped us crazy college kids from dancing in all the other bars we frequented, despite there being no official dance floor to speak of), Queenshead (the one and ONLY bar I have ever been kicked out of), or the Hole In The Wall bakery, that, besides Pizza Capri, was the only thing open at 3am when we decided that the beer calories didn't count and we needed a little snack (which unfortunately I only ever randomly stumbled upon in a state of inebriation and had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA where to even begin looking for it).

However, I DID remember the exact café where I was a "regular" and became friends with the owners, three Moroccan cousins called Omar, Mimi and Mohammad, who insisted on calling me Kate (which sounded terrifically funny with a French accent), gave me a CD of their favorite Charles Aznavour songs, and even let me pretend to be a bartender so we could take funny pictures and mess with the other customers.

Café l'Archêveché

One excellent salad niçoise and café crème later, it was apparent that the Three Musketeers had moved on to (hopefully) bigger and better things, but the new waiter somehow managed to seat me at the exact table I claimed as my own the first time around (how long ago? all together now: nine ... ).

le sigh. Life sure is interesting sometimes.

While I drew the line at stalking my old living quarters attached to the house of my host family, it came as quite the thunderclap when I realized that our hotel was on the exact road I had taken to get home every day from school, and that if I had felt so inclined I could easily find my way back to that long gravel lane where a mean dog incongruously named Joy would bark menacingly at me from behind her "beware of chien" sign.

In the three-ish days I spent in Aix, I ate anchovies every day. Yes, you heard correctly: I ATE ANCHOVIES EVERY SINGLE DAY. Born-again Mikey strikes again: After countless years of hating those nasty, salty, fishy-tasting, wrong-looking THINGS, I decided to try them once again, just to be sure I still didn't like them. Holy crap, those things are DELICIOUS. And while I don't see myself turning into a Squash clone and ordering an entire pizza full of them, I can ingest two whole fishies with complete abandon before I have to put the brakes on and let the internal systems (including the psyche) digest what I've just put down the hatch.

My old favorite underground Crêpes-A-GoGo was closed on Sunday, but we ducked into a cute café looking out over the Rotonde fountaine, where we had the first glass of my new-found obsession: thé à la menthe, a delicious concoction of mint tea delicately flavored with mild green tea leaves and sugar. I know, nothing new or earthshattering to many people, but yar! It was served out of such a gorgeous silver tea pot, with a cute little man-shaped cloth around the handle so you wouldn't burn your hand picking it up to pour seconds (and thirds...heh heh) into these beautiful double shot glass-sized glasses decorated with exotic swirly designs of green and gold. Drinking tea is always very calming in general, but THIS went to a whole new level...like it was meant to be a simple, no-less-meaningful-if-you-did-it-everyday ceremony to gently draw your attention to enjoying every sip and heightening your awareness of the beauty of the music playing in the background and the fabulousness of the people you're drinking with.

All in all, it was hilarious to be back, wandering the streets with complete disregard to any attempts to build an internal map, or even, for that matter, to look at a printed one, since there is NO WAY to "properly" navigate the twists and turns with which the ancient Romans seemed to delight in wreaking havoc on even the least directionally challenged. (North, wha...?)

A la prochaine, Aix, à la prochaine...
kK