This morning the doorbell rang. It was Julien, tired and unshaven, but it was my Julien! I didn’t even know he had caught a flight back home. Miraculously, the sun is out as well and the temperatures have risen. It feels like summer again.
So I leave you with my favourite song from the newest Arcade Fire album:
Ah, the rewards after 2 months of torture!
Currently listening to:
Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
I am wrapped up in angry, stormy and negative thoughts these days. It’s been almost two months that I’ve been alone with the baby, in a city where I have no relatives to whom I can hand her over to for a few hours of rest. I know I should think about my husband who is having a rough time as well, but in my head I can’t help wishing that the situation be reversed. I am losing this psy-war battle of 24/7 babytime. I would love to be able to wake up knowing that someone else could change her diaper, or give her breakfast. I would love to be able to have a few hours to myself. I hate that people lie about visas to appease worries, I hate that people let things stretch until Ramadan, I hate that people don’t care about letting families stay apart, and I hate that we will not be able to celebrate our child’s first birthday together. So this is how it feels to suffocate. I have the utmost respect for single mothers, or single fathers. I don’t know how you do it.
(Sorry, I just need to let it out, and this blog is all I have. But seriously, isn’t it sad to not have the whole family together during your child’s first birthday?)
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But cripes, thank god we have some good news on the music front !!! Listen to Arcade Fire’s newest album The Suburbs here.
Currently listening to:
Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
Damn, I want this drummer for my band! Mamaaaa… Mama? Yoohoo, Mama!
Currently listening to:
Eluvium
Similes
It’s a Tuesday night, a rainy and cold one at that, but over at the 11th arrondisement’s rue Oberkampf it feels like a Friday night. Cafés and restaurants are filled to the brim with bored-looking, chain-smoking Parisians. It’s almost 21:30 but people are still spilling out of the metros and heading off to appointed meeting places to wait for their friends before flitting off to bars to start their evening.
I get off the metro and walk down the length of rue Oberkampf to Nouveau Casino. I’ve got a ticket to see Midlake in my bag, purchased months ago. Actually, I have a pair of Midlake tickets. Julien and I were supposed to go together, but because no babysitter was available he offered to stay home because I badly needed a night out and Jul is aces like that.
A lot of my friends think that going to concerts alone is sort of sad. It is, in a way, but I don’t really mind. I used to go to concerts alone while Julien was in Qatar and I was still in Paris. The only problem with going alone is that if you go to the bar to get a beer no one saves your place on the floor.
The new album has yet to grow on me; I have to admit that I find that the songs drag a bit, but then again it’s probably just my mood. Also, after an hour of traveling by metro to get to the concert I was all wound up and ready to dance, but a lot of the songs from the latest album are “sway tracks” – so we ended up just swaying a lot. I guess, like I said, I just wasn’t in the mood for it.
They did play Roscoe and Head Home and some other tracks from The Trials of Van Occupanther; such a shame they didn’t have anything from Bamnan and Silvercork on the playlist. But don’t get me wrong – they’re a fantastic band to see live. The songs from the new album are melancholic, bare and raw, and the effect achieved is what Midlake does best: they hide complexities in the most basic of melodies. And yes, it works!
Here’s an oldie but goodie from Midlake’s Bamnan and Silvercork (video by Jason Lee too, take that!):
And Roscoe from The Trials of Van Occupanther (god, when I think of the number of times I had this song on repeat while driving the roads of Doha…)
Fortune, from The Courage of Others:
Currently listening to:
Midlake
The Courage of Others
Currently listening to:
Mùm
Finally We are Noone
Last week my friend Jessi and I met face-to-face after 10 years of “knowing” each other. It never fails to amaze me how the internet brings people together, how it forms friendships, and how you can get to know utterly cool people after a few exchanges. We had a brilliant time; she is a brilliant person, and we both saw a brilliant concert of Animal Collective at Le Bataclan (they have a bar/café as well – everything is overpriced, but you get an extra round of peanuts or potato chips if you get a cool waiter). I admit I didn’t really take to their album Feels, but Merriweather Post Pavillion is something else.
I know that Jessi and I are going to see a helluva lot more concerts together in the future, as long as I stick to Europe (or fly somewhere else where there’s something happening).
Currently listening to:
Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavillion
Love the band, love the album, love the song, love the video… Kala obsessed!
Currently listening to:
Ten Kens
Ten Kens
It’s been two years and four months since this happened. This morning I roll out of bed and see an sms message from Doctor Doom:
Borrowed cd of Nada Surf from library. The Weight is a Gift. Loved it!
Again, just to make my point, it’s been two years and four months since I told her about it.
Currently listening to:
Nada Surf
The Weight is a Gift
Last week, the tiles on the kitchen floor started to swell, as if there was an octopus lurking underneath, trying to get out (even though I know that octopuses… octupii?… can fit thru a bottle’s neck. Saw it on National Geogrphic years ago. Fucking amazing, those creatures! I am quite obsessed with them). Then followed a strange sound, and suddenly the cement holding the tiles together started to crumble. Ah, construction in Qatar. At first glance everything looks ok, but the truth is that buildings, and their finishings, are put together haphazardly. I’ll bet that in 10 years most of the buildings here will start crumbling.
This afternoon I took a nap, which lasted 5 hours. I woke up because of my bad driving. In my dream, I was driving à la Qatari — recklessly. My sister was with me and I was breaking about a hundred and twenty rules of Safe Driving. What really woke me up though, was when I overtook another car and found myself at a stoplight (of course, it was red, and contrary to my earlier driving, I actually stopped). The road was titled at a crazy angle; it was a slope, but we were practically vertical, the car almost tipping over backwards. Panicked, I realised that I didn’t know how to handle slopes (which is crazy, because I aced the hanging part in the driving exam, where you stop and restart the car at a slope). I was yelling at my sister, my foot frozen on the brakes, knowing that we were going to tip over. She was teasing me, saying “You mean you don’t know? You mean we’re going to hit the car behind us?” and finally she pulled up the handbrake, but my foot still wouldn’t leave the brake.
There are a thousand interpretations for this dream but I’m too bored to even think about them. My mind, it’s mush. It’s filled with work and music and the biography of Marie Antoinette (which I’m reading right now, and it’s fucking brilliant!). And my body feels different — I blame Julien, who is currently in this Healthy Zone Bubble. I find myself in the gym more and more, even though I pass my time on the treadmill raising various existential questions, the most popular being, What’s The Point Of Running When The Goal Is Unknown And I’m Not Really Moving And Anyway I Know I’ll Never Get There?
***
The area where I live is under constant, irritating, massive construction. Actually, ever since we arrived at the West Bay area, practically half of the streets have been under heavy travaux. Orange cones protect nonsense construction (for example, there has been a hole in the middle of the sidewalk that hasn’t been closed for months – and in this hole is a ladder… that leads to nothing but soil. Existential questions, all over again…), and now the roundabout leading to City Center has been closed (it’s being replaced with stoplights, finally), leaving clueless drivers to navigate themselves thru a maze of diversions, which blatantly lack the appropriate arrows and road signs.
It’s madness! No wonder I’ve been dreaming of reckless driving.
***
In response to all the hysteria, I plug my ears with math rock.
Currently listening to:
65daysofstatic
One Time for All Time
Apparently Pete Doherty pissed off his French fans by cancelling his Paris shows… twice. This very angry girl, who spent 6 hours on the train to get to Paris from Grenoble, shows us that the word ‘fuck‘, like ‘cool‘ or ‘Coca Cola‘, is universal and extremely handy in situations like this. I’d stay away from her for a couple of days. I loves it, loves it when the French rant !
(seen and swiped from darkglobe.fr)
Currently listening to:
Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
