 Deluminated
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Name: Jessie
Country: United States
State: Oklahoma
Metro: Tulsa
Gender: Female
Interests: Poetry. Storms. Nerddom + Academic Team. Photography. Staring at the night sky. Aviation, Airports, Anywhere Far Far Away. "Me and my indie rock." Books. Roar-y.
Expertise: Converting oxygen to carbon dioxide.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Zoology+French, Chemistry
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  Interrowhimper
Member Since:
2/4/2004
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| Maybe I should think about changing the tagline to this blog, because at the show on Tuesday night, M. Ward sang "Into the caverns of tomorrow, we'll shine the flashlights of our love" instead.
As you may or may not be aware (whoever you are, still floating around in xangaland), I recently undertook a trip to London to see Monsters of Folk and the Decemberists.
Tuesday was MOF night. When I got there early, I stood in line for about two hours feeling really silly, because even though there was a huge line of ticketed people, I was the only one for over an hour in the "ticket collection" line (apparently they don't say will-call in the UK?)
The waiting paid off, though, and ended up just right of center on the front rail. I met some kids who were standing near me, one from Norway and one from Ireland, who'd met up in London to see the show. Among us we'd traveled quite a way, so that was pretty amusing. Afterward we shared a ride in the cab of the most inept driver in London, who was reprimanded by the police for not using the "shiny things on the side of his car" (in the words of the angry constable) as we were getting out. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The concert was amazing. There was no opener, and they played three hours solid, including almost all of their eponymous record and a lot of tunes from their individual catalogs. Bright Eyes was the heaviest played, maybe because there are two members of Bright Eyes in the band (Mike Mogis and Conor Oberst). The Bright Eyes songs on the setlist were Soul Singer in a Session Band, We Are Nowhere and It's Now, Smoke Without Fire (with M. Ward, as it's recorded), Kathy with a K's Song (duet with M. Ward), Lime Tree (duet with Jim James), The Big Picture, At the Bottom of Everything, and a very folky Hit the Switch. I might be missing some of them. A few of those were just Conor on guitar and Mike Mogis on pedal steel or mandolin, but mostly they were converted into duets. I absolutely loved the Conor/M. Ward Kathy with a K's Song. It's a pretty old song, and the vocals in particular on the recording are very different from Conor's current style. I didn't even recognize it at first, and then M. Ward came in with the first lyrics? Pretty awesome.
The internet lies when it says that M. Ward played O'Brien. I wished really hard for that to happen, but it didn't. However, he did play To Save Me, and Chinese Translation, and that was enough for me. I've so far been unsuccessful at finding a setlist -- there are a few floating around the internet, but they're each wrong in several ways.
Conor was rambunctious, making jokes about the Queen ("London, you're a wonderful son of a bitch -- I'm talking about the Queen"), pouring beer on the snare drum in the middle of a song, standing on the bass drum and stomping on a tom. During the encore, which I think was At the Bottom of Everything, Whole Lotta Losin', Another Travelin' Song, and (I think?) His Master's Voice. After At the Bottom of Everything, Conor had managed to knock over half the drumset, and they had to have a break for the drummer and several guitar techs to try and piece it back together. He ended by shoving his piano off of its platform and being sort off stage by a tech.
The other members of the band (and their drummer, Will Johnson from Centro-matic) appeared to be much more sober. Jim James was giving lessons in saying "thank you very much" in Spanish, and referring to his "sons" Conor Oberst and "Montgomery" Ward. That was about it for banter, though, and after the show the security guards hurried everyone out.
As for Thursday, with the Decemberists, I got there about two hours early, and stood in line with a couple of Americans who were working on their masters degrees in linguistics and museum studies respectively. The whole line was just full of American accents. It was a wonder any Londoners actually got in to see the show, though to be fair it was the second of two nights. I had to collect my ticket from will-call again, and got up to the front, where I again met the kids around me. It was one kid's birthday, and that comes into play way later. The couple behind me were pretty hardcore fans, it seemed, even having gone to Portland to see them in their hometown. The crowd was in a really good mood, and no one was pushing -- or smoking! -- and I didn't get beer spilled on me once. Emmy the Great opened. And by that I mean, came out promptly, played exactly thirty minutes, and then there was a maybe ten minute set change, followed by a few minutes of Pink Floyd's Meddle. The English don't share our lazy ideas about how late concerts should go, apparently. That, or there's a noise curfew.
The first set was the Hazards of Love in its entirety, with not even a hello at the beginning and no break between songs. I was told on the phone that there was a strict no-camera policy, which didn't turn out to be the case. I was pretty bitter about having been lied to, but I did get a few shots with my phone to come out relatively clear.
Highlights were any song with the Queen singing (Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond). She was excellent, and that's her and the shadowy Chris Funk on the left. My personal favorite was (and really, has always been) the Rake's Song -- it was Colin on guitar and vocals, and Nate on bass, and the rest of the band furiously playing drums. Really fun.
 After the album was completed, they took a fifteen minute break and came back out for a set of songs taken from the last several albums. Colin ruthlessly quashed the crowd's chanting for the Tain, saying they'd just finished a whole hour set and were not about to play a twenty minute song.
The setlist, as I remember it, was The Crane Wife 3 ("and now we'll go directly into the songs about gypsies, shall we?"), Shiny, Yankee Bayonet, The Legionnaire's Lament, Billy Liar, 16 by 32, and O! Valencia. There was a lot of audience participation in Billy Liar and 16 by 32, in which Colin renamed my new friend the birthday boy "Steve" and used him to divide the crowd. I think it made his night, and possibly his life. The encore was Eli the Barrowboy and The Mariner's Revenge Song, at which time the giant inflatable orca that someone had brought for crowd circulation, and which had been confiscated "until the proper time" by Colin Meloy finally came into play.
Mariner's Revenge, if you don't know it, is almost 9 minutes long, and always accompanied by lots of theatrics, live. The audience is instructed in how to scream like it's being swallowed by a whale -- the photo above is Colin and Chris telling us what the sign is. The drummer plays a floor tom and a tambourine, mostly one with the other -- he shattered three tambourines into pieces during the course of the song. He's at the mic on the left wearing a piece of one of them on his head.
After the show I hung around for a while. Usually the Decemberists are pretty good about signing things and meeting fans...however, since they were only playing two gigs in the UK, they didn't so much have a tour bus. Nor did the venue so much have a back entrance accessible from the street, since everything is built rather close together in London. I gave up after maybe 45 minutes and took the Underground back to the hostel. And man, Underground stations are far apart compared to, say, metro stops in Paris.
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| It has been entirely too long. I know that. I'm sorry.
I've been keeping this journal since February of 2004, I think, and I feel like it should continue. I've just been too focused on my France-centric blog lately, I think.
Life is good. The weather is turning cold and rainy. I miss my friends and family, probably all the more because the holidays are quickly approaching.
Today, I received an inflatable turkey that my dad sent me as a gift. He's a funny guy.
There is, of course, no Thanksgiving in France. However, next week I'll be in London to see Monsters of Folk and the Decemberists. I can't wait.
Today was Wade's birthday, and Friday the 13th. I just got home from a techno club (yes, I realize it's 6 a.m.) and I know I should have gone to bed earlier. But hey, it's Friday. Er, Saturday. Gotta love student life in Bordeaux.
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| Since I've been blogging so much on my other blog, I've been neglecting this one. I definitely recommend you read that one, but from time to time I'm going to copy a post from there to here. Here goes:
Everything you can buy in Bordeaux is smaller than almost anything you could buy in Oklahoma.
This is most frustrating where it concerns bottled beverages. It's kind of maddening where it concerns milk, as Alex has adopted it as his comfort food, and virtually every time I go looking for milk, we're out again. The last time I went to the grocery store I bought a pack of 6 cartons of milk (altogether maybe it's a gallon -- I'm not sure why they don't just put it all in one carton/bottle if they're going to package them 6 at a time). The only reason I'd been delaying purchasing milk like this is that it's stored at room temperature in the grocery store. I guess some of the milk in France is pasteurized at an ultra high temperature, which makes it okay to keep out instead of refrigerating, but that's sort of contrary to my (I'm sure) thoroughly American idea of how dairy products should be treated.
Anyway, it's not just buying beverages. It's also cars, streets, you name it. Our glasses and towels in the apartment are all sort of comically tiny. Yesterday I went to buy a laundry bag (I didn't bring one with me and got tired of having nothing to use as a laundry hamper) and found it to be about half the size that I expected it to be. Then I remembered how our washing machine has about half the capacity of the one at my old apartment in Norman, and it made a little more sense. And, I suppose, if I'm going to hang my clothes out to dry, there's only so much available space that can be dedicating to drying clothes.
I'm also beginning to feel too tall to live in this country.
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| I've been frustrated today with all of the French bureaucracy. For a detailed account of my struggles and adventures, see my other blog. For now, here's what I've learned, or marveled at, so far:
- No sales tax (or, sales tax included) - the first time I was trying to buy a power converter at Fnac, I stood in line trying to figure out whether I had enough cash, and what French sales tax would be, since it occurred to me I had no idea. I figured tax for 16%, figuring if it was even twice as much as OK sales tax I'd still have enough cash on me. And then I got to the register and realized the brilliance of things actually costing what they say they cost. Amazing.
- Escalators go up the wrong way. That is to say, if you're trying to go up on the escalator, choose the one on the left, because the one on the right will be going the wrong way. I'm not sure why this is, since people in general walk on the right and drive on the right. But escalators? Backwards.
- Lightswitches. Up means off, and down means on. It doesn't really matter, I guess. I just still walk up to light switches and try to push them the wrong direction.
- PDA. People are much freer with the affection they display in public. I think this is largely a good thing, and I am trying to keep my American awkwardness out of it.
- People aren't homophobic. Or at least in the way many Americans are. I guess maybe that's because kissing is such a social staple, but it's refreshing.
- There's so much life in the city! At all hours, people hanging out at restaurants and bars. And not just young people. There are shops all over the city. Tiny, specialty shops -- owned by people instead of corporations. Today I passed a luthier and a guy who made custom drums. And a spice shop. And any number of really cool small things that just aren't surviving in America. I hope they continue to thrive in France.
That's all.
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| A lot has been going on lately. I guess the short story is that in the last week, I visited my brother and his family in Tustin, CA; got to see Sterling and Christal for a bunch of pre-departure Rock Band in LA; drove to Dallas to hang out with, and bid farewell to, Zack; had the family going away party at my parents' house (the last dinner party I'll ever attend there!); spent a day with Hunter; showed up at home just in time to see Les come in out of the blue; and accomplished my first ever biennial flight review with Yann.
Oh, and I moved to France, where I live in an 18th century flat in downtown Bordeaux.
This is a post I wrote for my Bordeaux blog, which you can find at jctinbdx.blogspot.com. I think I'm going to copy a lot of those posts here, but I think I'll be giving that address to a lot more people than have this one. Just in case you wondered what was up. Oh, and the music? It's rising up to the apartment from the pub down the street. I can't believe this is real.
Here goes:
I woke up this morning at 6 CDT, and sort of dragged my feet to the shower and through the end of packing. We put my stuff in the car and went to Blue Moon, where I ate a delicious granola parfait. Mom and Dad drove me to the airport, where I waited for two hours to get on my plane to Houston.
The flight to Houston was uneventful. When I got there I ate a Chicago-style mini-pizza for lunch and found it to be way, way less than impressive. I waited for three hours, and then got on my plane to Paris.
I had the best flight experience ever -- I had a window seat near the middle of the plane, with no one seated next to me. I got a lot more room than I otherwise would have had to stretch out in, and I could have gotten out of my seat any time I wanted! It was a miracle. I even managed to fall asleep for about ten minutes, until the airplane started beeping relentlessly and I couldn't get there again.
I landed in Paris and-- you guessed it -- did another few hours of waiting. I wandered around looking for my gate, with the sinking feeling that my bags would never make it to Bordeaux -- after all, how could it possibly be true that I didn't need to pick them up in Paris, take them through customs, and then re-check them? That was the case, however. Customs was about the easiest thing ever. No forms and no questions at all -- not even "how are you". He didn't look at my visa, just gave me an entry stamp. I hope that's not a bad thing.
So then I had three hours to wait. Charles de Gaulle is fascinating on a couple of levels. I find it bizarre architecturally, but probably more interesting is that it has very little semblance of organization. I mean, for an airport of that size, it has completely inadequate seating, staff, and routine. The employees that, in the US, are waiting at each gate for as long as you are, seem just to flit between gates at CDG, only appearing five minutes before boarding time, with an angry line of customers on cell phones trying to upgrade their seats or catch a later flight or any number of other things. And while the staff is busy trying to handle those people, the rest of the passengers are at least thirty minutes late boarding. Which is exactly what happened to me today. So, exhausted and more irritated by the second, I stood in front of gate D54, with so many people packed so closely that when she finally DID call rows 15-36, I couldn't even GET to the gate. Boarding took 45 minutes after it started 30 minutes late.
As you can imagine, as is probably everyone's reaction when they don't have the phone number of the person picking them up, and have no idea what she looks like, and no way to communicate how very, very late they're going to be to your first meeting, I was getting pretty anxious.
I got on the plane next to a French woman with a very young son who wouldn't stop hitting or kicking me all during the flight, especially when I was trying to sleep. His mother didn't seem to care. She made sort of vague admonitions about how he shouldn't, but it wasn't very effective. Miraculously, I fell asleep seconds after takeoff. Wheels-up was the absolute last thing I remember, before I was kicked awake to see the flight attendants picking up trash and preparing the cabin for landing. And that's when the anxiety kicked back in again.
I got my bags, was was both surprising and a relief, since I really didn't want to have left them in Paris. Bernadette was waiting right at the exit from the baggage carousel, and when she saw me she instantly asked if I was me. We loaded my stuff into her Peugeot and drove straight to her hours, to have lunch with her kids. We spoke French on the way, and she was complimentary of both my speaking and my writing, and told me I shouldn't even worry about taking the DEFLE test and just take classes.
Anyway, there are three kids, probably the youngest is 15 or 16 and the oldest is somewhere around 20. We had lunch out in the garden, which is pretty much the exact image you would conjure in your head if I told you to picture the scene. The house was two stories with red shutters and grape vines growing up the walls -- complete with grapes, some of which we ate with our meal. We also had homegrown tomatoes with olive oil, slices of cantaloupe, some zucchini and eggplant, and while all of that was going on, Bernadette's son was grilling mackerel on a table next to us. Like, whole mackerel.
Those of you who know me might recognize the problem with this, since I typically draw the line at eating anythign that still has recognizable body parts -- in particular, eyes. However, I figured it was my first five minutes in France, and sort of adopted a "do as the Romans do" idea. I'm not sure the Romans eat whole mackerel, but there it is. It wasn't bad, either.
After lunch we ate some grapes from the garden and drank some coffee (they offered to make me "weak American coffee" and I declined rather adamantly -- because French coffee is delicious) and talked about the apartment and various other things. We switched back and forth between French and English a lot. Mostly they spoke among themselves in French and about half the time to me in English. Sometimes the kids would ask for clarification on what an English word meant, or which to use, and I would do the same with a French one. It was a really pleasant afternoon.
Afther that, Pauline, Augustin, Bernadette and I drove to the apartment, pointing out landmarks and resources along the way, and Bernadette walked me around explaining about things. I have a rommate until tomorrow. She's a French woman who was part of the round of tenants before me. She's not home yet, so I haven't met her, but hopefully things will go smoothly. We need to talk about changing the electricity and internet to my name, and hopefully other things.
I called my mom after Bernadette left, to assure them that I wasn't dead or anything. The apartment is 18th century construction, with a stone staircase worn dangerously smooth over generations. It has these 10 foot glass doors that open onto a wrought iron railing over the street, looking straight at the Hotel des Archives, which is a 17th century building with wisteria blooming on the second story across from my window.
I hung up with my mother and went on a search for euros and groceries, in case when the weekend happens tomorrow, I can't find anything. I succeeded in finding an ATM several times, as well as a post office near my flat and my tram stops and the cathedral and any number of interesting things. The grocery store was pretty elusive, for all that Bernadette had pointed me in its direction. I walked to where I thought it would be and didn't find it, so I sort of made a circle back to the cathedral near my place. I expanded the circle and found nothing. By this time I was getting pretty discouraged. I'd been up, by this time, for 27 hours, and not really in the mood for walking long distances, or failure. Still, I kept on.
The third time I expanded the circle, I found a supermarket called "MarchéPlus!". I started laughing. Hard. It's really funny if you consider that "Marché" can either mean "market" or be the past participle of walked. It seemed to me that the store's very name was applauding me for having walked so very much more than necessary to find it.
Exhausted and not really sure how much stuff I wanted to carry home, my grocery buying came to this: milk, cereal, butter, pasta, three bananas, some yogurt, a corkscrew, a three-euro bottle of Bordeaux, and a baguette.
Now I'm home, with the windows open and the sounds drifting up from the street. I am content, and exhausted. Trying to stay awake until bedtime, to avoid awakward jet lag...wish me luck.
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