Yearly Archives: 2011

France, Day 3: Paris

The hotel man­ag­er is some­thing of a bum­bling old man who bare­ly speaks a lick of English and wears a check­ered sweater and cap even though it’s boil­ing out­side. When I asked him for his name, he said, “Monsieur ________”. “And you”, he said, “are Mr. Laenin”?, as the room was booked under Karin’s name. I laughed and shook my head. “Better you with a girl than a boy with a boy”, he said, touch­ing the tips of his index fin­gers to rep­re­sent some non­de­script rela­tion he did­n’t approve of. Even though it was a com­plete­ly homo­pho­bic com­ment, his Parisian charm almost let him get away with it. Almost.

Every time I see him now, he asks me if she slept over last night. I think he assumes I came to Paris for some kind of booty call.

faces on Belleville wall

 

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France, Day 2: Paris

It has­n’t quite clicked in that I’m here yet. I was occu­pied with so much back home that this trip for­ev­er felt like it was far away, even when I was fly­ing out the next day. It’s Ascension Day in France — a coun­try made up most­ly of Roman Catholics — so every­one has the day off and most shops are closed.

Paris at night

9:30pm and it’s still bright out.

During the day it’s close to 30°C, and the heat makes cer­tain smells come out in Montmatre, rem­i­nis­cent of Chinese mar­ket­places (though nowhere near as pun­gent). The tem­per­a­ture drops to a brisk tem­per­a­ture in the evening though, and one needs to car­ry a coat or sweater when trav­el­ing at night.

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France, Day 1: Paris

I find myself in Paris once again, this time for a video con­tract over the next 10 days. Karin approached me to work with her in cre­at­ing sev­er­al films around this beau­ti­ful city, and I have the plea­sure of being involved with this amaz­ing per­son­al project of hers.

view from Sacre Coeur

This is only the sec­ond time I’ve been at Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, and both times there’s been weed in the air. I even passed by a man try­ing to roll a joint while sit­ting on a park bench, his paper mad­ly flap­ping in the wind. There must be some­thing real­ly trip­py about the church.

I’m doing it bet­ter this time. More effi­cient, lighter lug­gage. Luckily, I’ve made this trip before and the expe­ri­ence is pay­ing off. Pushing my lim­its last vis­it has giv­en me the con­fi­dence to han­dle any­thing that may hap­pen. I can retrace my steps with­out a map, remem­ber­ing where I took what pho­tos on which walks.

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Spanish Romance

To be hon­est, I’d nev­er heard of Spanish Romance until this year. Once I found out it was a clas­si­cal stan­dard, I start­ed see­ing it on all these CDs by respect­ed gui­tarists and com­pi­la­tion albums of “clas­si­cal greats”. It seems like any­one learn­ing clas­si­cal gui­tar will try to tack­le it at some point, seduced by such an ele­gant melody. I have no clas­si­cal aspi­ra­tions, and even I fell for it.

I fig­ure I’d record this before I cut off my nails cause I’ve been grow­ing them for about two months1 and I’m com­plete­ly sick of them. They clack on my key­board and iPad, and I always have to be annoy­ing­ly care­ful about not break­ing them. Unfortunately, this song also sounds way bet­ter with some bright­ness to it when it’s not played with actu­al nylon strings; I’m still using a set of Silk and Steel, and there’s a cer­tain fat­ness to the sound when you real­ly dig into them.

I’ve only had Larissa for six months now, but it feels more like six years. There’s so much famil­iar­i­ty in the wood and glossy curves. Even when I’m try­ing out a gui­tar sev­er­al times the price of what she would cost, it nev­er feels as nice.

  1. Although halfway through I cut them down to 1/4 length and lost a lot of growth cause I thought they were inter­fer­ing with my rest-stroke. Turns out the prob­lem was actu­al­ly in my tech­nique. Oops. [↩]

Dear Lisa

It was this suc­cinct wit. She could say so much in a line or two, and any­thing left unsaid would only serve to feed your curios­i­ty. You’d be giv­en the punch­line, this blow that would knock the wind out of you, then won­der what cir­cum­stances could have led up to that. I’ve always been after that style, that abil­i­ty to move peo­ple with words the way hers used to move me.

Dolly and Lisa

Of course Dolly has to sleep on any­thing new in the house, regard­less of whether it’s your sweater or not. It’s part of the sass, and yet one can’t help but reward her with cud­dles and love.

For a few years, I lost her to the hap­pi­ness (where I hope to lose myself one day) until we spent a rainy day togeth­er, blissed out and hope­ful­ly obvi­ous only to the check-out lady who scanned all our vari­eties of choco­late.

Dear Lisa believes in me, and that’s the only rea­son I believe in myself too.