I live across the street from a Live Hot Shower Show.

While I’m admittedly often quick to make the cheeky metaphor, the title of this post is the most literal thing I’ve ever written. I live across the street from a Live Hot Shower Show.  Why is this capitalized? I don’t know. But the Raidd Bar, whose awning I look directly down upon from my window, advertises it as such, so I’m going to stick with their stylistic decisions.

My apartment building is essentially at the corner of Gay and Gayer as far as Paris is concerned. The boulangerie downstairs is called Legay Choc (yes, it means what you suspect it means). While I frequent it for baguettes and the occasional tarte framboise, I suspect they make the majority of their money on a little item called le pain magique, a cock-and-balls shaped roll with sesame seeds for pubic hair. Oh, they also sell bags and bags of pale pink, penis-shaped meringues. Need to buy some bondage gear in Paris?  I can refer you to at least half a dozen shops nearby. Les Mots à la Bouche is one of the most impressive gay and lesbian bookstores I’ve ever seen, both for novelty items and serious queer theory. My neighborhood teems bars with names like Le Feeling and Open Café, out of which hoards of well-groomed gentlemen spill onto the street every night. But Raidd Bar, with live DJs seven nights a week and the Live Hot Shower Show, is the king of them all.  I seriously wish I had stock in this place. As my dear British friend would say, Raidd is always heaving.

You may be so vanilla as to now inquire, “What, praytell, does the Live Hot Shower Show consist of?” As far as I can ascertain, there is a large glassed-in vitrine in the center of the bar in which a handful (a large handful?! sorry) of extremely strapping young men, well, take a live hot shower. I’m sure there is also dancing involved, and maybe also some towel work? I’m not entirely sure, because by the time the Live Hot Shower Show has commenced, the windows of the bar are completely fogged up and all you can see is purple and pink lights flashing inside. Occasionally, damp men fall out into the street for a smoke. Everyone looks pretty hot and bothered by the time they leave.  Your next question might well be: “Well, why haven’t you been to the Live Hot Shower Show?” I haven’t been because it isn’t the kind of place that appears tourist-friendly, as one might say. Most of the bars in my neighborhood aren’t particularly conducive to female patrons. And honestly, I get it. Do your thing, boys. I feel lucky to live in a neighborhood where there are people out and about at all hours and I am never, ever harassed on my walk home late at night from the métro. Granted, I’m not harassed because nobody in my neighborhood after ten p.m. has even the remotest interest in me, but sometimes it’s nice to go blissfully unnoticed. If you are curious about what happens inside, Raidd Bar has a very well-designed website, complete with a killer opening video sequence. I’m not going to link there, as I suspect they get plenty of web traffic on their own. But Google it if you would like to see some very cut young men that possess a rather remarkable, if niche, skill set.

The one drawback of living in such close proximity to a Live Hot Shower Show is that it is a rather loud affair. First there is the happy hour, when the first rounds of patrons show up for the night. Then there are the two nightly live shows, in which the music is cranked to full volume (fortunately these guys are as gaga for Lady Gaga as I am). On Fridays, Saturdays, and inexplicably some Sundays and Mondays, there is a serious house DJ until 2 or 3 a.m. Then, there is the inevitable post-bar-ejection hookup loitering, in which a dozen or so drunken guys schmooze with one another on the street until everybody figures out who they are going home with. Finally, around 4 a.m. the dancers from the Live Hot Shower Show go home, glistening, beautiful, and often singing Barbara Streisand songs at the top of their lungs. I’m not being hyperbolic. Last night it was “Happy Days are Here Again.” They nailed it.

I’ve spent a fair amount of evenings watching the proceedings from my window.  It’s pretty addictive, as several of my houseguests can certainly attest.  My mother could barely peel herself from the window during her entire visit for the holidays.  It sometimes makes for a wistful Friday night, like the one I find myself in the midst of now.  I stayed in to try and get some dissertation reading done, and instead I’m looking out the window and wondering why there isn’t more Cyndi Lauper, more Madonna, more ABBA, and more hot-water-centric entertainment in my life.

I’ve become voyeuristically well-acquainted with some of the regular patrons, including one guy who always, always wears a white leather suit, Labor Day rules be damned. He is often bare-chested underneath, even on some of the most frigid evenings. He’s loud, he’s proud, and he never, ever goes home alone. I like this guy. He really puts himself out there. He’s tenacious. Sometimes, long after everyone else has left the building, he is still out on the corner trying to put something together for himself.  Often at 5 a.m. on a workday. But nevertheless, tonight I had a lovely surprise:

You might not be able to tell from my clandestinely-shot photo, but that’s white leather suit guy with ANOTHER white leather suit guy. I watched them for a while and they are definitely an item, a pleasantly touchy-feely item. There was a cheek kiss! As far as I’m concerned, cheek kisses mean these two crazy kids are sharing the Sunday paper over brunch. If finding someone else willing to wear a white leather suit that matches your own when you go to see the Live Hot Shower Show together isn’t the dictionary definition of “soulmate,” I don’t know what is. I’ve never been more encouraged that there is somebody for everybody out there.

Good night, dear reader.  I hope this finds you on the verge of an amazing weekend.  While that may or may not include a Live Hot Shower Show, I do think it gives us all certain lotus-eating paradigm to aim for, yes?

Contempt and my new color-scheme

Last night I went to see Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt) at La Cinémathèque Française, a place that is all kinds of awesome. It’s housed in an amazing Frank Gehry building, has an incredible museum and library of cinema on the premises, and screens an entirely overwhelming number of films on a daily basis. If you wanted to know ground-zero for an autodidactic approach to becoming a real cinéphile, La Cinémathèque Française is the place. I’ve seen Contempt many times before (how would I know how to do my eyeliner or wear stripes if I hadn’t?), but this was the first time I’d seen it on the big screen and man was it cool. They are showing Contempt as part of a larger retrospective on the work of Alberto Moravia, the Italian writer responsible for many of the most interesting narratives of that era of filmmaking. I’m planning to hit the Bertolucci and the Pasolini screenings next week. I find it is good to have goals.

I don’t know whether it is the sudden profusion of bright, blue-sky days in Paris or merely my fatigue with the monochromatic look of winter clothing, but I’ve been starved for some new colors in my life lately. While I had a pleasant recollection of Godard’s gorgeous use of the primary color palette in the film, something about the mustard yellows, cherry reds, and robin egg blues really hit home last night. If you too are needing some new hues in your life, here’s some stills I stole from the internets. Hope they make you feel as swell as I did.

Clarence in Paris: Les Diables au Thym

Les Diables au Thym

35 rue Bergère, 75009 Paris

www.lesdiablesauthym.com

Métro:  Grands-Boulevards

March already?  When exactly did that happen?  If anybody ever tells you that moving to Paris will be good in terms of progress on your graduate degree, don’t believe them.  You need to live somewhere like Orange County to be that breed of productive. Give me a cultural wasteland filled with chain restaurants and I’m a higher-learning machine.  Here I’m an unproductive imbecile that spends hours wandering around random neighborhoods muttering to myself about “the light,” stoned on endless glasses of red wine and various forms of animal fat.  It’s pathetic.  I mean, I guess my French is getting better and I know a lot more about wine now and I’ve watched more Italian cinema than you can shake a stick at in the past few months. So I’m not saying I regret it, exactly, but it’s really March?  Huh.

Sorry we’ve been so myopic over here at Keeping the Bear Garden in the Background. I was reading over the last week of posts and every single one is about my crankiness or my sadness or my liver.  How fun for you that must be!  Seriously though, I don’t know if it is more fun for you to read about the things I eat, but I do think that poor little Clarence needs to come out to play.  The detox has turned him into a dour little mope.

Among the many lovely gifts that A gave me during his month here, one thing I’m particularly amped about is my copy of Le petit Lebey des bistrots parisiens 2010.  A downsized version of the Le Guide Lebey, Le petit Lebey focuses entirely on the wealth of bistro cooking available in Paris, making it better suited to my sensibilities and budget.  If a restaurant makes it into the guide, it’s good.  From there, restaurants are given between one and three marmites (those sort of miniature dutch-oven things), indicating bonne cuisine, très bonne cuisine, and un des meilleurs bistros de Paris.  Each entry gives a description of the chef’s style and the general ambiance of the bistro, a detailed list of the types of dishes you can expect to see, and a breakdown of the meal that the reviewer ate (including the wine they chose).  Instead of some ambiguous system of dollar or euro signs that designate abstract ranges in price, Le petit Lebey gives you something like this (sample from the entry on Les Diables au Thym):

Notre repas du 19 mars:  Galantine de viande et confiture d’oignons, poitrine de veau farcie et gratin dauphinois, crème au chocolat.  Prix:  44 € pour ce repas avec un verre de haut-médoc et un verre de côtes-roannaises.

I suspect that my readers are the type of people who would finds this kind of detail incredibly comforting.  I don’t mind spending some money on a meal, but it’s nice to go into a situation with a sense of what that is going to look like.  Moreover, wherever you find yourself in the city, Le petit Lebey is likely to have some recommendations nearby.  It’s broken down by arrondissement and even in areas I wouldn’t have imagined, they list several seriously delicious-sounding places. A’s rationale for buying it for me was that in addition to all of the above, it’s also purse-sized.  Sadly, instead I’ve been keeping it by my bed and reading it with the same kind of late-night fervor that I imagine a 14-year-old boy might use to peruse a porno mag.  To each their own.

When my friend O was in town for the theater, I was pleased to bust out my new guide when looking for a restaurant close to the theater.  I quickly found the two-marmite ranked Les Diables au Thym, the work of Chef Eric Lassauce.  They have a wonderfully laid-out website that also allows you to make reservations online, a nice feature when you are trying to make dinner plans for that evening but are stuck in that midday rut in which restaurants don’t answer the phone.  When I exited the métro at Grands-Boulevards, I had a moment of skepticism when I was confronted with a large Hard Rock Cafe.  My stomach sank as I searched for the restaurant as I was convinced that I was a Big Fat Failure of a Parisian resident who managed to pick a shitty restaurant in a shitty part of town for one of my friend’s only evenings here.  The area seemed to be crammed with every tourist trap available to the discerning Parisian palate, including Leon des Bruxelles (with their Denny’s-style Technicolor pictures on the menu) and Indiana (because when I think Tex-Mex, I definitely think Indiana).  To my surprise, however, Les Diables au Thym is a darling little place tucked away on a side street and sparely decorated with an eclectic collection of lamps and some nice collages.  We were the first people there (when exactly DO people eat if they are going to the theater in this town?), but they were incredibly welcoming of us.

Okay, here’s the part I know you’re hot for:  what we ate.  In addition to some killer-sounding dishes à la carte, Les Diables au Thym has a lovely menu that allows for you to select an entrée, plat, and dessert for 28 € (22 € at lunch).  I chose the salade de lentilles, haddock, œuf mollet; the poitrine de porc braisée, aux carottes; and the marquise au chocolat noir aux oranges confites.  My entrée of lentils were cooked with lardons and topped with iridescent, salty hunks of smoked haddock and a poached egg, whose yolk spilled deliciously over the whole affair.  My pork was arrived on a beautiful slab of stone and had a golden, caramelized layer of skin over the falling-apart and perfectly moist meat.  It was served with candied carrots and pearl onions that had a strong flavor of chili and anise in addition to the sweetness.  Really killer.  Finally, my marquise au chocolat noir, which I can sometimes find to be texturally uninteresting, was filled with pistachios, making for a lovely crunch in addition to the sweetness of the chocolate and the tang of the bitter orange sauce.  O had an entrée of galantine de canard, chutney de mangue; a fricassée de calamars au “Rigatoni” for her main course, and a baba au rhum, crème chantilly for dessert.  She seemed underwhelmed by her meal and said that the galantine de canard was especially bland.  The calamari in her pasta dish was lovely, however, and her baba was light and effervescent.  We shared a nice Saint-Émilion, I don’t remember which, but the wine list is excellently curated.  I keep using “curated” to describe these culinary decisions – is that food-writing blasphemy?  Oh well, I like it.

Details: What a nice place this would be to go for a peaceful lunch or dinner, especially if you were foolish enough to endure shopping in the enormous crowds at the big department stores on Boulevard Haussmann.  Certainly beats most of the other options in the area.  You can make reservations online.  Closed on Saturdays for lunch and all day Sunday.  The menu in particular is a wonderful nosh for the money (like I said earlier, 28 € at dinner, 22 € at lunch).

That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.

Hands-down, best Google search to arrive at my blog thus far: “keeping bear in bear garden.”  I laughed myself silly on that one.  “Honey, I haven’t made any headway on that rabid-bear-containment issue, but look at this funny girl writing about her high school reunion  and restaurants in Paris!  Honey?  HONEY!?!?”

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A leaves tomorrow and I’m going to spare you a long description of my mopey, snotty, teary, bleary-eyed sadness.  He is about to begin a dead-serious post in a place that has gotten seriously little attention as far as humanitarian crises go.  If you’ve been following the crises in Haiti and Chile, you certainly know that MSF is always at the front-line of these kinds of emergencies.  What you may not know (I certainly didn’t) is that they currently have operations in forty countries, many of which do not receive much in the way of media attention, especially in the West. I can’t speak to the work of other NGOs or humanitarian aid organizations, but I can say that if the rest of MSF is staffed by people with one-tenth of A’s dedication, integrity, and intelligence, then it is a worthy organization for any dinero you would like to give.  I’ve put up a link on the sidebar to the donation section of the MSF site. If you are curious, also check out the informational site called the International Crisis Group.  A directed my attention there and I’ve been using their reports to learn a bit more about the places in crisis that don’t receive a lot of mainstream coverage.  It is smart, no-frills, and acutely detailed site.

To A:  Vaya con Dios, brah. Few people will appreciate that Point Break / Fast and the Furious reference as much as you. Who will I joke around about la technologie française with when you are gone? More importantly, who will I eat it with? Thanks for an amazing visit. You are going to be seriously missed.

Eclisse Twist!

I just realized that you might be needing a new theme song.  Give this one a spin:

Consider the pics of Monica Vitti a bonus prize. I’m personally going to spend the rest of the day resenting my plebeian bone structure. I sort of can’t believe that we even call anyone in this current generation of actors and actresses “stars.”  Go watch some Marcello and Monica.  You won’t regret it.

Eclisse Twist!

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Thanks, M!