Brotpourri/Brolture wars

Hey bro-natics, Uncle Sauce here again. Apologies for another week without posting; the host parents confiscated my laptop after I messed up saying Grace. This here's another catch-up post, and boy have I got some crazy shit for y'all to suce on. Well actually, there aren't any events in particular I'm going to talk about, this one's sort of dedicated to the bizarre cultural differences I've seen thus far, with some brominiscing mixed in. First of all, razor scooters. Yeah. What the fuck, France. Sixth-grade Sauce just called from 2002, and he wants his ride to school back (every day, bitches). This is the only place where I've seen full grown adults pushing around on two wheels like some sort of Never-Never Land scenario brought to life. They're everywhere- sidewalks, buses, metro- and they even fold them up to carry when they're not using them. It's seriously hilarious. I saw a woman on the metro who looked every inch the businesswoman on her way home from work, and then I saw the scooter under her arm. If it had been the U.S., I would have said to myself "oh, it's her kid's and he's over there sitting down and she's carrying his scooter for him because he's tired". No kid here though. She scootered off as soon as the doors opened, because here it's normal to scooter on the metro platform. So strange. The scooters here even have bigger wheels, because they're made for adults. As if Americans needed another reason to believe that French people are massive pussies. Although I've been told that this is becoming a trend in NYC as well, in which case I may have to dust off the ol' Laser for one last spin (the parents were too cheap to get me the real thing). Another vestige of my early adolescence which has come back and smacked me in the mouth like a Jean-Claude van Damme roundhouse kick is- wait for it- orange slices. As in, what Billy's mom used to bring to soccer games when you were 6 so the whole team could chow down during halftime and wish it would've been Kyle's mom's turn so they could have Chewy bars. For reasons I have yet to divine, our replenishment during our grueling, dirty, super-manly rugby matches is orange slices. The coach just pops them out during the huddle like it's nothing. I literally burst out laughing when I first saw it. I feel as if French society is slowly regressing back into childhood, like a mass Benjamin Button outbreak. Not that they're not delicious, but in the states you're more likely to get a Natty Light on the sidelines- none of that fruit bullshit. Enough apt cultural observations for now, though. Actually, one more. Halloween! C'mon, France! How can you not love this holiday? 1) You love candy. 2) You love literally everything else from America, including but not limited to Razor scooters, CSI, Lady Gaga, and McDonalds. 3) It's not like you don't enjoy dressing bizarrely- I see plenty of bright yellow pants and purple hair on a daily basis. So basically, what I'm saying is I was absolutely shocked on Halloween night when me and Christian "Odysseus" Lalonde left my apartment building only to realize that this country could not care less. So there was the sadness and disappointment, but also the acute embarrassment of riding on the metro for 20 minutes while dressed up as the Albanian kidnappers from Taken (we are sick people), surrounded by mostly normally-dressed Parisians. Fortunately, when I ("Nico") and Christian ("Marko") arrived at Kalei ("Jackson Pollock Painting") Talwar's apartment, we were in luck. We had somehow scrounged up enough of the ol' Halloween spirit to create the most understated, subdued Halloween party ever held. Knocking back vodka-orange-cavas with Tintin, a Real Housewife from New Jersey, a cat, Baby Spice, Salvador Dali, and a witch, while speaking in hushed tones and not daring to put on music, has to be the saddest memory I have of this semester. Despite the rape-y vibe of me and Christian's costumes, which we evidently had not considered when deciding to go to a Halloween party that was 95% girls, some people actually thought it was funny. Ok, like one person. It might have been a little over the line when we started "taking" other party guests (ransom: 1 shot). All I can say is, good thing Liam Neeson wasn't there!

Nico and Marko

Actually, to continue the bizarre U.S. vs. France motif that I've set here, we went to a literal U.S. vs. France soccer match a couple weeks back. AI even made the trip up, swelling our numbers to a whopping 12 people, which was easily 1/3rd of the entire U.S. fan population there. Nevertheless, we were at our ugly finest, chanting U-S-A at every opportunity and yelling witty barbs like "You're welcome for D-Day!" and "Your country fucking sucks!". Despite our best efforts, the good guys lost, 1-nil, which was especially painful because of the jeering 4-year-old in front of me with the French flag painted on his face. I'm serious- that little asshole got to me. No doubt he'll grow up thinking that wave he was doing all game was invented in la France. Not so, petit ecolier- not fucking so. You'd better think next time you hop on that little scooter, too. That, and when you chant the tune from "Seven Nation Army" after you score, like that's French too. Get your own song! Gahhhhhh. Alright, that's enough for now. Time for Sauce to get his beauty rest. A bientot. More bropdates later.

P.S. Meanwhile, it's almost fucking December here- the semester's coming to a close. How time flies. Hope y'all that are still reading have enjoyed keeping abreast of your favorite freres' adventures so far. A.I.'s gonna tell y'all about his malade weekend in Paris. Also, just learned how to say "dick-slap" in French- bifler (bee-flay). It's a combination of the verb gifler, "to slap", and bite, "dick". I knew I liked it here.

Brocelona

Hey kids. Uncle Sauce here. Yeah, I'm still here! Feverishly thinking of ways to entertain you! Experiencing everything there is to see and do in Paris! Forgetting that this blog exists! Just kidding, I've just been very lazy. Lot's of fun to catch everyone up on. Few weeks ago, went to Barcelona for Toussaint break. As in, "I am going Toussaint Tropez for a week in the middle of the semester, even though in France school is a joke and we have class once a week". Barcelona, for those who aren't initiated, is on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, not to far from their border with France. It's in a region called Catalonia (or Catalunya), which, disappointingly, does not mean that it is run by a council of all-powerful cats (Many of whom would, ostensibly, have been educated at the Veterinary School where I have rugby practice). That I know of. Also, Barcelona, it turns out, is siiiiiiiick! We had an awesome time. I was there with Koko "doesn't need a nickname" Fisch, Elaine "Schmelly" Cheung (sorry), Christian "My hair is gorgeous" Lalonde, Ivy "Icy" Johnson, Hannah "Grace" Eidman, and Peter "Michael" Rothe. We stayed with Koko's friend from highschool, named Ki, who is awesome, and who lives in a giant old warehouse which is now a space for artists to live. It was, I can truthfully say, the coolest living situation I have ever observed, and probably will ever see, unless they figure out a way to replace the walls with glass and put it underwater (or white sauce). It's basically become 13 little apartments on 2 floors, with these massive common areas on both floors, one of which was basically designed for large smokeouts / photography shoots, and the other being a large communal kitchen. Not that we spent a ton of time there (we spent a ton of time there.).

Temple of Sin/Our house for a week

But, we also saw and experienced a lot of Barcelona. La Sagrada Familia, designed by Antoni Gaudi, who probably was drinking a lot of pineau, was truly magnificent. It has yet to be finished, because its design is truly unique/time-consuming, and also probably because Gaudi himself died during its construction because he stepped out into the street to admire it, and was promptly flattened by a truck whose driver was doing the same thing. Seriously. The building looks like a normal cathedral which God saw and decided to build a dripcastle on top of, because he had just been at the awesome beach a mile away. Parts of it are gothic, other parts look like something out of Dr. Seuss. On the inside, which also isn't finished, the columns look like they turn into trees midway up, and the branches become the supports for the ceiling. Seriously, seriously cool. We also went to the Picasso Museum, because there aren't enough museums in Paris, and definitely not one devoted to Picasso, but this one was also pretty interesting. Picasso evidently forgot what things looked like about halfway into his career, but before that he was pas mal. Also, he had this hilarious phase where he painted pottery, and the stuff looks exactly like crap I used to make at Made By You as Christmas presents for my parents. Someone probably told them they needed more art at the museum so they got their kids to throw some glaze at the china collection. At least, that's how it looks to my trained eye. We also went on La Rambla, which is very beautiful, as well as Parc Guell, another Gaudi masterpiece/pineau-induced vision. If Sagrada Familia is the church of Whoville, then Parc Guell is their little town square/mountain/performance space. It also has an insane view of the entire city.

WHOOOOOOAAAAAAAAA

But probably the highlight of the trip was going to see FC FREAKING BARCELONA play on one of our last nights there. We got the tickets like, a day before, and it turns out they were ENORME. Me and Christian were sitting probably 20 rows back, and we were facing goal for 3 Barca goals, all of which were scored by Messi (game ended 5-nil. Suck it, Mallorca!). If you're reading this, Lio, nicely done.

This is where we were sitting.....

Of course, the beach was also nice- yes, it was still beach weather there, if anyone saw my previous post- although I'm still trying to forget the image of 70 year old bare breasts which has been seared into my retinas. We also went out clubbing/barring most nights, which was great- especially the Razzmatazz club, the largest in Barcelona, where we danced until literally 6 in the morning. The highlight of Razzmatazz was definitely seeing our 20-something housemate, Caesar, boogie down on the dance floor. Previous to this episode, we had thought for sure he was like a super-hetero Australian brah, because he never wore a shirt and would do pullups on this rope outside his room in front of everyone. But the way he got down on the dance floor was, may I say, flamboyant. He was completely ignoring this gorgeous Australian girl who had come to visit him, and who we had assumed was his girlfriend, because he couldn't get enough Ke$ha. Pretty drole, if you ask me. Overall, Barcelona definitely gets approval from the Sauce. Don't forget to try their cava, or the paella. A bientot! Also, AI, we should look into getting a Tumblr. Gotta give the people visual aides.

Brorgiveness / Broflections

Sauce, you don't need to apologize to anyone for not updating the blog. Our schedules are chock full and we don't always have the time or energy to share every miniscule detail of our lives with our needy fans. They need to recognize. That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank Zach Schonfeld for boosting our hits; we seem to be still riding on the coattails of the October 6 Wesleying post that brought LVEB to national attention. Since then we have counted over 25,000 unique hits*! That's more viewers than Tom Anderson has on his Myspace page, yo! (This is probably true.)

So as I was walking home from Paris yesterday, I realized something: my tastes in music have barely changed in the last dozen years. I mean, sure, I've become slightly more discerning, and I got the Pitchfork logo branded on my left buttock, and I know how many people are in Bon Iver--one, right???--but, honestly, what did I listen to before that I would dislike now? Maybe I'm asking the wrong question--literally someone please tell me how many people are in Bon Iver--but it seems like I should be accumulating some kind of sophistication as I age and get exposed to more and more music, shedding embarrassing phases à la Christian Lalonde shedding weight grâce à his miserly host parents. The truth is, there will always be a place in my heart for Bro Strings Attached.

But also Hybrid Theory, Linkin Park's 2000 chef d'œuvre. For real, people, definition of a classic. Something about a guy named Chester belting out melodrama just gets to me. And I'm not even thinking about "In the End," (although I am thinking about it right now,) which, by the way, is the eighth track on the album! Can you believe that? What current band would have the cojones to stash their single in the back like that? Really, every song brings that angsty heat I still love; sometimes I catch myself chanting: "Forfeit the game/before somebody else takes you out of the frame/and puts your name to shame." It might be an oblique reference to World of Warcraft, but hell if I care; that's the word of God right there.

Anyway, the nostalgia for prepubescence passes and I am sitting on my bed trying to kill a mosquito. It is the middle of November and there is a mosquito all up in my shit. Now, I'm not a scientist (although this guy is), but how much more evidence do we need to prove that global warming is going to kill us all--or worse, let mosquitoes survive past early fall? It's pretty easy to see why the French aren't leading the race to combat the problem; they have like a billion different terms for it: réchauffement du monde, réchauffement climatique, réchauffement planétaire, réchauffement de la planète, etc. etc. etc. Really though, France, pick an adjective and admit that the crisis exists. Just because you people drive motorized rickshaws doesn't mean you are helping the world out. The cigarettes your country smokes daily are probably as bad for the environment as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also known as the World's Worst 4/20 Ever). Also, your dogs shit everywhere, indiscriminately and en masse. Clean that up. Christ, I feel like Marie Antoinette Poppins.

Par contre, I will be honest and say that the weather this weekend was divine, the perfect occasion for me and Swag to hit the City of Lights and remind our fellow collegians how to really party. This largely resulted in waking up in the afternoon, walking for a couple of hours, collapsing into food, and drinking ourselves into an extended hypnagogic state. For the record, I managed to take care of lotsa activities in my 50 hours: I hit the Jardin/Palais du Luxembourg, the Marais, the Canal St. Martin, the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Sacré Cœur, the Bastille, the Champ de Mars, Saint Germain, a Tibetan restaurant, and a desolate street corner off the Rue Oberkampf. Damn! And I didn't even mention Friday night, when a bunch of us diehard soccer fans went to see Uncle Sam vs. Le Coq Sportif at Stade de France, an event marked less by both teams' disappointing performances than by running into Sciences-Po-Nerd-In-Residence Faye "Chauncey Billups" Phillips, who regaled me with stories of Scandinavia, an affair she is having with the President of the Louvre, and some other equally banal things that I don't remember. We had an amazing pregame dinner--literally--at our friend Koko's mom's friend's apartment. I'm pretty sure she made those madeleines. Some other people chopped tomatoes or whatever, but all credit goes to Koko and her mother for the delicious spread, and également for putting up with our "well I would hate for this bottle of Jack Daniel's to go to waste!" and other antics.

I would like to stress that, though Paris has a reputation for being expensive as all get-up, I found love in a hopeless place some pretty good deals in the Bastille neighborhood, next to where my host for the weekend Jesse "Rick" Ross-Silverman lives. Ya'll know Jules? If not, get wise. I'm talking boots that neither confine my wardrobe to "longshoreman" nor cast me as a young Nancy Sinatra, 'bout 60 euro for them joints. Additionally, I copped a sharp oxford for 15 Eazy €s. Believe when I say that when I hit the club later that weekend, I left the other mecs in the dust. Except for that one guy who shoved me. He shoved me really far.

Actually, I got pretty lucky in terms of paying for food (although I made sure, conscientious tourist that I am, to compensate with libation) both nights. Saturday, the Sauce's parents, typically referred to as MomDad, treated me, ledit Sauce, and Christian "Don't Starve Me Bro" Lalonde to an exquis dinner near the Eiffel Tower, at a restaurant appropriately named FL. (Say it out loud, idiot.) The ambience was nice, the wine was great, and even though Jamie's dad called me "Jew Boy" (only once!) it was a lot of fun to hang out with the original Sauces. Papa Sauce is literally French and put me on some good words to repérer for the future: perdrix, for example, means "partridge." Thanks.

So, yeah. Other than this painful blister I received from hours of dancing in my new Jules, this weekend was nothing but awesome time after awesome time. I'm hoping to hit up P-town once more before the end of the semester, but I don't want to raise everyone's expectations, only to have them crushed by the weight of finals and the depressing prospect of spending another pair of three-hour train rides wedged in between fellow tardy passengers, stepped on by small children and battle-rapped at by obnoxious SNCF attendants.

Morocco might be in my future? Not before a torrent of papers and oral exams! Who will prevail in the battle between lazy and grade-conscious? Find out soon...in the mean time, let's just appreciate the awkwardly nice weather. Jew Boy out; take it away, Sawse.

Bropologies

New post coming soon... I promise! (bromise?)

Things on the docket:

Brocelona

Brolloween

Broccer

Brozor scooters

Brorange slices

-Sauce

Here's a picture of some bronzin'!

Brovember

Happy belated halloween, escrocs! I hope everyone had a fantastic time out and about Monday, reveling in the only night of the year (with the possible exception of Passover) that people can pretend to be on the margins of society--whores, zombies, etc.--and yell at strangers until they are given desserts. When I think back, my all-time favorite Halloween has got to be 10/31/1998, the year I dressed up like Bill Clinton and, due to an understandable administrative mix-up, was called in to break things off permanently with Monica Lewinsky on the President's behalf. Trick got a treat all right.

Ever since then, Halloween has just not seemed real enough for me. I've been doing bigger and more intricate costumes, like in 2006 when I commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake by dressing up as one hundred earthquakes, but it always feels like I'm missing something. That's why this year I was SO excited when I figured out a totally amazing new way to celebrate Halloween: get sick! That's right, sick. While you guys were out parading your adorable, taking-Disney-to-a-whole-new-level-of-inappropriate getups, I was in bed, sweating and yet also freezing my balls off, fighting off delirium, sucking hot water through a tube, shaking violently as I tried to take one of those trusty French medications (this one I believe was called Feral Alien), only conscious enough to listen to Seinfeld episodes--which, I've realized, does not compromise the quality of the show in any way.

Soon enough, however, my body realized that everything would be fine if it just chilled out for a minute and let me go to sleep; and that is exactly what I did. TWELVE HOURS LATER, I woke up, no fever, no chills, no pain in the glavin, feeling like roughly 724,000 euros. The day after Halloween in France is a federal holiday, an unbelievably brilliant idea which America should adopt immediately if She wants to be taken seriously in this world. This jour férié, French for "Shabbat", is crucial for those of us who need to catch up on sleep, The Wire, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Up All Night, the original Office, crossword puzzles, the AFI Top 100, the IMDB Top 250, Wesleying, La Blogothèque, the Paul Rudd discography, reading, and other essentials.

Also, professional sports. What does that mean anymore? I've completely lost touch. Trying to get a football game on at a bar here is like asking Jesse Ross-Silverman who won the World Series: you feel stupid for even posing the question.

Jesse's cool with me saying that.* We caught up a lot when I tagged along with him, Ari "A-Fish Twin" Fishman, and Molly "My Dad Makes Lots of Things Have Sex with Each Other" Hanessian at Pitchfork last weekend. The festival capped off an outrageously fun five days I spent in Paris. I really did it all, you know, from climbing to the top of the Eiffel Tower, to stealing a stuffed elk from the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, to seeing Justin Vernon French kiss Lykke Li at the Grande Halle de la Villette, to shooting a mime off the Pont Alexandre III, to briefly curating the unbelievable Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, to finding a parking ticket that belonged to Jean-Paul Sartre at the Café Flor, to having a glass bottle broken on me so it could be used as a weapon against a homeless man on the ligne 8, to translating the new Clooney/Gosling movie The Ides of March to an entirely French audience, to looting a construction site with Jens Lekman off the Rue du Rivoli, to getting a 24-hour hallucination from a falafel/opium I got in the Marais, to delivering the 7,000,000,000th child at the Hôpital Saint-Vincent de Paul, to wearing the same pair of jeans every day of my entire vacation except Friday.**

Ah, memories. Well, it's time for me to face the music and give a presentation on the influence of William Shakespeare in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, which could either last 45 minutes or none at all because the professor said that she might also just not pick us to present so it's like, okay, great, I guess I will just do all this work for your class even though it is only worth 25% of the total comp lit course, but it's cool that I stayed up until 4am two weeks ago and did the fucking paper while you were "sick" in bed and didn't tell us we wouldn't have class until we were already at school, so that's

[Edited Thursday, 19h00: The presentation lasted two hours. That is not a typo.]

*This remains to be seen.

**Many of these things actually happened to me.*