Romancing the Grad Student

Here we go again. Another wave of Recruitments will arive at UCSF in a few days. Like a bunch of matrons preparing for a debutante ball, anticipation and excitement rush through the faculty. Here at UCSF, a purely grad university, graduate recruitment is taken very very seriously.

A cadre of carefully handpicked candidates, from the hundreds that apply, will be flown into the city of San Francisco. They will be put in luxurious comfortable hotels, probably the first time some of them have experienced such luxury. Once ensconced in their comfortable hotels, and after sight-seeing the city, a couple of intensive days are scheduled.

These kids, with their freshly-scrubbed faces and newly-minted bachelor degrees, now partake in an elaborate ritual. Each of them will undergo a long series of interviews with a series different professors. In the interviews, the professors will try to delve behind those sparkling cv's, stratospheric sat scores and gushing personal essays, to see if, indeed, they have the right stuff. The right stuff, that is, to slave away for the next five years. For the kids who are accepted, they are the clay for these masters of science to mold into the next generation of scientists. What are they looking for? A sharp mind, passion, acuity, but most of all, the ability to submit.

Submission? These kids might think they've been treated like royalty, but little do they realise that, for the calculating professors tenured at ucsf, those who end up here, will provide el cheapo research-per-dollar. Research can be counted in real dollar terms. An top research school like UCSF is judged on its research. This can be measured in terms of papers published in big journals, and on the number of citations. High-quality incoming students will provide the best shock-troops in the battle for the research dollar.

For the next five years, the kids who choose grad-school will watch their friends from college who did law or engineering, one by one, begin to find jobs and earn vastly more money than they. They will suffer the iniquities of being a shit-kicker, but do research that may grace the most prestigous science journals, whilst working hours that might even make a lawyer blush. Of course, this will not dawn on them until far into the future.

Meanwhile, the magic is to make all these worries dissappear. The trick is alcohol. High class catering companies are called in and liberal amounts of alcohol will be served. During the next few days, there will be reception after reception. Waiters in tuxedos and white gloves will pour glass after glass of medium quality wines (after all, what does a 21 year old really know about wine?). Roasted meats, sweetmeats, hors d'oeuvres, cakes will be provided in obscene mountainous piles. This is obscene mainly because the grad students who are already at UCSF, will eye the available food and alcohol with ravenous envy, such is the disparity between life-before-recruitment and life-after-recruitment. Some will manage to sneak into the reception and gorge themselves, despite the best efforts of the Recruitment officers to quarantine them. Others will only look on longingly, unable to break etiquette.

Yet there is something a little stiff about a reception at the university. No, the piece-de-resistance, will be the "after-party". A spontaneous expression of camaderie and scientific togetherness? No, it's planned. Before every recruitment, a "socially-active" grad student or post-doc is tapped. "Don't you just want to hold a party for the recruits?" asks the Recruiting Officer. The tapped student equivocates. "You know, it will be funded by the school," the officer reassures. "Generously." The student begins to cave; just one more push should do it. "But don't worry, we won't need to know what happens. Just show the kids a good time. A very good time." The last Recruitment party ended up in the nether regions of the Castro.

So after a heady weekend of interviews, receptions and parties, most of these kids pack their bags and head-off to their next recruitment.

A Very San Francisco Moment

San-Francisco Moments are highlighted with (*)

I had recently promised myself to *see more dance, and so it came to pass that I had a Saturday night with nothing to do but to *leaf through the San Francsico Guardian, where I find that, just down the street, a *Women of the Way Festival is taking place, a small festival running over a few weeks with an emphasis on *contempary dance.

It wasn't going to start until 8pm, so *I go to La Taquiera, a rather famous Tex-Mex eatery, which had got itself listed in the San Francisco Chronicle* top 100 restaurants, and is arguably the cheapest restaurant on the list. This is a subjective thing, but I like the burritos at La Taquiera as they leave out the rice, which amplifies the flavours of the other ingredients in the burrito. Fed and satiated, I stumble over to the Mission Dance Theater, and get one of the last tickets. I sit in the front, the lights dim, the dancers ghost onto the stage in silhouette. I watch a couple of okay performances, a little bland in execution and completely devoid of narrative.

Then came a wonderful piece called 'Two Kisses', from Fresh Meat Productions, which was performed under a spoken story about the coming-of-age of a *trans-gender boy/girl and his/her first experience in school. It was beautifully acted , where the dance both supported and expanded the story. No matter what art form - I have now come to believe that characterization and story are essential. This 10 minute dance masterpiece had both in abundance. It was so well-executed that I ended-up discussing with my neighbour in the theater, the exact meaning of the order of the lifts at the end of the piece.

Of course, some of the pieces had an overt *leftist political overtone.The last piece Rennaisance, by Rococo Risque: Red Gate Performance Collective Project, was a smart, satiric, self-consciously camp, fast-paced romp of burlesque comedy. It's all about cultural stereotypes, and the homo-erotic German envoy to the United Nations Security Council had me in stitches.

But I neglect to tell you the piece that had me laughing so hard that I thought my kidneys were going rupture out of their moorings. It's called War n' Worms. In the beginning, we have on-stage an electric-violin, a bass, a wooden box-like tone-drum, and a african drum. All the musicians are wearing *hippy clothes. The bass starts up, with some some fluttering ornamentation from the electric-violin.

Then, the woman who is playing the violin, looks the audience in the eye, and says "I am hummingbird", and proceeds to play some hummingbird-like sounds. Next, the tall thin bespectacled nerdy looking guy at the tone-drum, wearing a large green sarong, starts rubbing his stick on the tone box producing a moaning sound "oooooooohhhhhh", "ooooooooooohhh". He, too, looks at the audience in the eye, and declares, "I am whale". I am trying very hard not to laugh at this point, which is not helped by sounds of muffled laughter behind me.

This followed by the bassist. Which of God's earthly creatures can the bass guitar represent, we, the collective audience, were wondering? Why, isn't it obvious, "I am dolphin, holder of the rhythm." And the african drum declared that, "I am squirrel". It was at this point, that the star of the show, stepped out from behind the curtain, a white woman wearing a flowing white robe. She sings with an awkard mix of operatic/blues mix. After running up and down the scales a few times, she sang on high, "I am Worm, from the Kingdom of Worm". I guess the slithering worm-loke warbling of her soprano voice was the Worm. But wait, there's one more character not introduced for there was still one more mircophone on stage. Out from the other side of the stage steps a tall black dude wearing, not hippy clothes, but a dapper suit with a matching red beret and long red scarf. He ambles over to the microphone, and in a rich chocalaty voice, declares that, no, wait, that, "I am Dragon.".

There is then vocal combat between the Dragon and the Worm, the Dragon rapping against the operatic gymnastics of the Worm. This goes on and on and on, in an incoherent improvistory kind of way. Something about pestilence and evil and or so.

Then the show stops. In song, the squirrel informs us that we are to find a piece of paper and a pencil under seat. We, the audience are then instructed to write our greatest fear on one side of the paper. On the other side, we write the quality we most desire to surve the War N' Worm.

I search desperately but cannot find my piece of paper, so I ask for a piece. I cannot help myself. I write down "Laughter" on one side. On the other I write "Decorum". I show the woman next to me, who has been stiffling her laughter for the last ten minutes. She finally breaks down and runs away.

What You'all think about the second person plural in English?

So I spent me some time in Texas, home on the range, dry desert heart-land. It's a rather pretty place, in a dry-scrub wide-blue-sky kind-of-way. The Texans are nice and friendly. Only one of the three Texan homes I visited had a gun display case next to their doorway. A beautiful mahogany case containing five beautiful shotguns. People who say Texan are gun-crazy are just pussies.

More than one Texan remarked to me how similar Australians are to them. They have a point. The dry desert feel of the land is similar - I can see the same squint of eyes under the harsh Texan sun. Texans and Australians are laconic in demeanour, and fond of loud straight-talking (not like those slippery city-slickers of the Eastern Seaboard). They are both connected to the land, though more in affect than in substance. Cowboy hats and spurs in Texas, Drizabone coats and bull-whips in Australia.

I rather like the slow-shuffle of the Texan drawl. And perhaps the most distinctive of the Texan dialect is the proliferation use of You'all. What a wonderful word. In English, there is no second person plural, and it's much the poorer for it. Elaborate constructions are needed to indicate the plural from the singular. In Australian, we use the rather clumsy Yous, which kind of slides around the mouth like treacle. Compare that that to the rounded cadence of You'all, with the crisp clean 'l' that embraces all the people you are addressing.

I, for one, would support the official adoption of You'all as the English second person plural.

to Anthony Bourdain

Listening to hard-ass-chef-turned-writer Anthony Bourdain in the flesh, I realized that his spoken words were every bit as tasty as his written words. Bourdain is the author of Kitchen Confidential, a breathless romp through the culinary underbelly of New York. He is a great story-teller, with an easy-going style that is a well-tossed mix of high and low-brow. He throws around haute-cusine terms as easily as cracks about methodine clinics. He is also the master of the professional put-down, a foul-mouthed crusader against food-infidels, the vegans.

One recurring theme was the humble origins of distinctive and enticing national cuisines. "Why," he asks, "do most of the great chefs come from the poorest regions of their countries?"After a wonderful digression, he finally answers, "because in the poor regions, you don't have access to ä wide variety of foods, you haven't got much to play with - you are by necessity, creative." I like that, poverty is the driving engine of gastronomical creativity.

And of course, being a celebrity chef, Bourdain attracted a large number of aspiring chefs to his book reading in a normal SF bookshop. Looking conspicuous in their tidy whites, these young cooking apprentices came to worship a cooking icon, laughing heartily at all the in-jokes. Yet, Bourdain was firm with these young apprentices, where he couldn't resist pointing out the reality to these fresh-faced Escoffier-wanabes. "You know, I've had many cooking-school graduates come through my kitchen. They'd given up everything - a good steady job, a comfortable life - to pursue their dream of being a chef. And then they come to my kitchen. And at the end of their first night, I can see their dream drain right of their eyes. It's tough work."

But what elevates his prose from the merely witty, is a deep appreciation of being human and alive. An example. During question time, someone lobbed him a question that he surely must get all the time, "What would you eat if your only had one more meal?" To which he replied, "I have two choices. 1. Braised bone marrow and bread. and 2. A really good tuna sashimi [sic]." Then he lists a series of fascinating anwsers that other chefs have given, "[some great chef]...would be content with baguette and cheese.". But then he adds, "but you know, in real life, the most commonly requested last meal is steak and potatoes."

"Hardly anyone eats a bite of that meal."

He that Giveth, shall Taketh Away

I came across this arresting quote

"In the same way that TV took politics away from the grassroots, the Internet will give it back."

Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup.com in Open Source Politics

Worshipping at the Shrine of the Beat

San Francisco, they say, is the literary mecca of the United States, or at least, that of the Western Pacific seaboard. And deep in the heart of San Francisco, admist the tourists and seed of North Beach, lies the holy Kaaba of American literature, City Lights Bookshop. This is the place where the Beat Poets gathered, condensed, and poured forth a unique stream of writings.

Alas, the most famous of the Beat Poets have passed on, Kerouac, Bukowski. Yet there are some that are left. The other night, I went to my first reading at City Lights. It was advertised as a gala event, a poetry recital from Gary Snyder, one of the surviving Beats. Surprisingly, this, was the first time Gary had been invited to read at City Lights. His poetry is suffused through with the terse and concrete quality of Zen. Indeed, Snyder explained that he spoke fluent Japanese and had spent 10 years in Japan. Yet, his is not a blind devotion. When asked about the haiku form by a young lad (who wanted to know because, he, the young lad wearing a hat and waistcoat, had written many haiku's in his past, but that now, he just stopped and wanted to know why - don't make me puke), Snyder answered that a haiku doesn't really work in English, the play of grammar in haiku is unique to the Japanese. Nevertheless, he admires the concision of haiku's, and that, he brings to his poetry. His concerns are epic, mountains, volcanoes, life, death and the burning towers of new york. I was almost brought to tears.

I had not realised how popular the reading was going to be. When I arrived, the door had just closed as there were so many people that they would have spilled onto the street. Having nothing better to do, I hung around outside. And sure enough, some weak-willed folks walked out before the event started and so I managed to be one of the last to sneak in. I squeezed into the hordes of people crammed into that bookshop, sandwiched between the books, listening to the Poet. It was so tight that my leg was starting to go dead from my awkard stance. I could feel the breathing of the person in front of me. I dared not move for fear of falling over someone. But at some point during the recital, during a moment when I got lost in the poetry, I realised that I had achieved communion with the fibrous vastness of the American imagination.

Election Fever reaches Boiling Point

I have been granted the fortune to be in the United States during an election year. As a citizen of the world, we get to see, from the outside in, the United States go through its 4-yearly epileptic fit known as the election for the POTUS (President of the United States). I remember being in Australia staring numbly at the TV screen gamely trying to remeber the names of the 50 states. Now I've almost got all the States memorized, their names associated with bits of political trivia (No republican pres has won without Ohio). From within, you can see the full treatment, the constant buzzing of the commentary, from talkshows to newsshows to newspapers.

Of course, USA is a b-i-g country, and where you are will determine what you see. Here, in San Francisco, one of the two poles of American liberalism (the other being that pit of sin - NYC), one gets a skewed view. Most folks around here are self-identified liberals, and people seem acutely embarassed by their POTUS. Most are politically blinkered and believe that Kerry will definitely win because they can't understand how anyone could vote for Bush. Others are defeatist simply by extrapolating from the target audience of American TV programming.

Just today, we had an impromptu politics discussion, where someone volunteers the information that although Dad and sis will vote for Bush, he and his mother will counteract that with votes for Kerry. Unfortunately, with the subtelties of the electoral college, votes in the solid blue Democratic chunk of California will make little difference. It could very well come down to the Jewish retirees and blacks of Florida, or the steel workers of Ohio.

Free Improvisation is Free for a Reason

There is a reason why Free Improvisation is free. Because there is no way I will ever pay money to see free improvisation again. I'd never seen any before and I managed to finally catch some last night.

Free improvisation is well, free. No rules. Dance, dialogue, happening, it's all there and it's all very serious. Se--Ri-Ous.

I now understood why there are divisions in art. There are dancers, and singers, and actors, script writers, and comedians. Some people can dance well, some can write well, some can improvise well. But it is impossible to do all these things well at the same time. I saw a man and a woman, clearly on the other side of 40, frollicking around the stage like two 5 year olds, making blubbering nonsense noises, throwing bodies around in big motions, tell a pointless story, and destroy a microphone. Frankly, I would have preferred to watch 5 year olds do the same things. At least they would have done it with joyous childful abandon.

You know that a piece of theater is bad when the artist halfway through his "routine" stops to tell the audience that this is, in fact, an improvisation. Duh! As if we couldn't tell that from the half-arsed unstructured mess that we had just witnessed.

Film Art as Insult

Last night, I watched some of the worst art films of my life. It was at the "Cabinet of the Muses", an inter-genre festival organized by Berkeley-heads and took place in a theater here in the Mission. We had sat through some okay poetry and an interesting dance piece. And then there was film.

With a measured pace, our projectionist, a thin emaciated man, with a gaut face, and displaying delicate manners, took command of the room. He spoke passionately of the three films he was going to show us, and informed us that he had planned half an hour of film pleasure. Little did we know that it would be half an hour of his hideous celluloid slapping us in the face until we had submitted ourselves to the will of film art.

The first film was "based" on some Gertrude Stein writings - "The Making of Americans". It starts off okay, a slow sweeping camera movement over a tableau of objects, some with obvious American resonances. This then cuts away to the torture. It doesn't start off as such. Imagine the scren is cut into six boxes. In each box is a woman. Each woman thus repeats a phrase, some kind of pathetic sociological pusing like, "More and more, americans repeat themselves". Then for the next 15 minutes, we watch these women say this, in different combinations, in different ways. For the first 20 seconds, it's kind of amusing, then you try to search for a pattern - maybe there's some kind of rhythmic pattern, but 20 seconds later, you realize to your horror - there isn't. The film maker couldn't possibly have that much imagination. We sit through the most mind-numbingly boring 10 minutes watching these women repeat themselves. Suprisingly, there was moderate applause at the end - probably due to the Gertrude Stein references.

Film two was a very average film, not shockingly bad, but incoherent - some hokey dialogue scratched onto the film as text, played over some background imagery. References to spermicidal creme and vaginas provoked laughter in the adolescent teenager dancers from the dance piece earlier in the show. After the end of this film, the organisers turned on the lights lights thinking "golly gee - let's start the break and give the audience some mercy" But no. Our film projectionist quickly barked out in a haughtingly hurt tone, "No. The films aren't finished yet. There's one more" I could hear the audience groan as the lights were dimmed once more.

Called Photoheliograph, this last piece is one of the worst things I have seen, and I have seen some pretty bad things. It starts off with 5 minutes of black and a humming track. Then there is a few more minutes of black with some slivers of color. Then a horrendously lurid pattern writhes on the screen - something with the attractive patterning of vomit. We were privileged to witness this for a few more minutes where the pattern changed in an epileptic-fit-inducing manner. Finally, it ends and there is relief.

Life as lived watched

I haven't been watching films recently but in the last 5 days, I have managed to watch a film a day. When you do this, you lose somewhat your grip on the reality of your own life. You are awake, let's say 16 hours of the day, and a movie is say 2 hours. Assuming that 1/2 the time you a zombie, then for the last 5 days, 2 out of the 8 hours of my waking time was absorbed in a fantasy world. that's a quarter of my waking time.

Here's a rundown:

Friday night, I went to see the "Yes-Men", a modern update on the theatre of the absurd. A bunch of jokers leverage their satiric web-site of the WTO by accepting invitations from humorless conference organisers that mistake the fake web-site for the real thing. They are invited to the conferences where they have carte-blanche to say and do things to an audience that the Yes-men have not one iota of respect for. The highlights include a gold-lame suit and some not-so-hidden freudian imagery. unbelievably funny.

Saturday night at the nearby Dolores park, I saw the ever-popular "Harold and Maude". Come to think about it, it seems to be ever-popular mainly with the womens. This is a classic film about the romance between a 20 year old boy and a 80 year old woman. Kind of like a "As Good as it gets" in reverse. Apart from the over-acting and the look-at-me-I'm-being-so-rebelious tone, the Cat Stevens soundtrack managed to beat me into submission. Now, I'm a bit of a sentimentalist and will go for a well-placed acoustic guitar song somewhere just after the climax of a good story arc. But surely there can't be 20 different arcs in the one story. Or can there? There was a Cat Stevens song, regular as clock-work every 10 minutes. A plaintive rhythmic strumming of chords and then the soothing sounds of Cat Stevens poetically summing up what you had just watched in the last ten minutes since the last song. Although our young protagist manages to get it on with our octogenerian friend, all this is shown quite discretely in a very buorgeios kind of way. Oh, what some of these new-wave violent-femme french directors would have done.

Sunday night, "Maria Full of Grace" was a Columbian movie I had wanted to see for a very long time. I managed to go by dragging my only Columbian friend and his entourage with me to the cinema. It's the story of a Columbian woman who becomes a mule - a human drug carrier. This film is the type of film making I most admire. Nothing flashy, no special effects - just a taut story, grounded in highly believable characters, revealing a real world that ostensibly exists but is just out of sight. No need for artificial plot devices, absurd elements, or edgy characters to make it interesting. The movie moves a measured naturalistic pace so that you can truly experience the nerve-racking middle of the film. And I think the scipt-writer judged the tone of the ending perfectly - not too down, not too up, a sort of unresolved hope.

Monday Night, I saw the delirious "Angels in America: Part One". Adapted from the Tony Award winning play, this was an all-star HBO production. Some guilty delights - Al Pacino playing a wheezing, duplicitous homosexual politician and Emma Thompson in a cameo as an Angel (of death?). The film is a sprawling look at homosexuality and aids. The conceit of the film (which works wonderfully) is the seguing of magical realist elements into the world. The writing is top notch and gives the actors plenty to showcase their talents in the full three hours. I eagerly await the next 3 hours of Part Two.

Tuesday Night, at my french film course, I saw "Le Gout des Autres", a sly comedy of manners involving a variety of characters floating around the world of art. Le gout, or taste, is the tenous thread that runs through the movie, whether it be in art, in people or in interior decoration. The film poses questions about how we use taste, the funny moment when you decide that you really really like something or someone. An irrevocable act that cannot be changed as you watch your life veer off in pursuit of it.

Cyber-Geek Fashion Police

Mercy on ye who use not gadgets of the ORTHODOXY. I learnt this painful lesson at work from J, our resident hi-tech junkie. J spends much of his disposable income on the latest hi-tech toy. He has not just a phone, but a flip-screen fully-featured computer. A flip of the screen reveals a full qwerty keyboard underneath, albeit one for tiny little hands. When he talks into his phone, it looks like he is talking into a palm-pilot . He can telnet to our servers at work 24/7. And he does. He was the first to buy an iTrip, a Powerbook, an iSight and he's probably going to buy an iLife.

Last but not least, J has a iPod. Or at least I assume that he has. But considering that he probably carries his Powerbook everywhere, he may treat his laptop as a very large MP3 player.

I had recently arrived in our lab and penniless from travelling, I had bought a cheap-ass hand-held radio. Listening to my radio with my headphones on, I passed by J's office. As is his custom, he glances up to see who walked past. On seeing my radio, his face passed through a series of expressions, from puzzlement, to approval, to disbelief, and finally to disgust, with a little slight upcurl of the edge of his lips. "Is that a.. a.. a.. radio?" he asks. I answer yes, and he just shakes his head like a father discovering that his son is gay for the first time.

Later, I managed to fish out of him what had gone on in his head. "Well,", he explained to me. "First, I saw that you had a music of device of some sort -evident from the earphones trailing out. I looked a bit closer and then realised it was a radio receiver. Now that couldn't be because that's just so wrong. [puzzlement] So then I thought you couldn't be that sad and so it must be an MP3 player with a retro design [approval]. I look a bit more and then relief that it really was a radio [disbelief]. That is just too sad. [disgust]."

The Apple Powerbook is art - it's official

What is art? An eternal question that I came to closer to answering the other day when I visited the SF Museum of Modern Art.

I visited SFMOMA for lack of something better to do on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The last time I was there, I was sorely disappointed mainly because I had just spent two afternoons roaming the glorious Metropolitan Museum of NY city. SFMOMA was a country-fair rock garden in comparison. That was a bit unfair as this time around, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. SFMOMA is a respectable museum with a reasonable number of the usual suspects: a couple of Picasso's, some Monets and a Mondrian or two.

So I wonder around and finally get to the section called the Art of Design and Architecture. Arranged in a sombre room are exemplary articles from the last few decades of American manufacturing. These are objects that have exceptionally beautiful design, and some of them are. Others are just bad acid trips from the 60's. And there, in the halcoyn holy shrine of Modern Art sits an Apple Powerbook, sealed by a thick clear plastic box, clearly to protect it from the ravages of Age. An unkind friend suggested that as Apple is a company based just outside San Francisco, an indecent donation to the SFMOMA may have helped the curators see the art in the Powerbook.I, on the other hand, believe in the purity of the Ideals of Art.

I fully expect to see an iPod enshrined, the next time I visit SFMOMA.OMA.

The All Devouring Mouth of American Consumption

Ever since I've arrived in the US of A, I've been buying non-stop. It's an insatiable hunger that cannot stop. You see everyone around you with the latest toys, constantly teasing, parading, whispering about what you are missing. They demonstrate those fancy transparent windows, the fine ergonomic design and even ... dare I say it ... the austerity of it.

And finally you crack. You go downtown searching that image that has burned in your brain after seeing thousands of subliminal commericals. You know where to get it. Nothing can stop you because it is your fundamental right as an American citizen (or at least as a legal alien) to buy. And they make it so easy for you - cash, check, visa, debit, mastercard. Just slide that piece of plastic mouths that sales clerk behind the counter. They dont say it directly - no they are nver that crude. It's in the sparkle in their eye, the slouch of their posture, the slight up-turn at the edge of their smile. Just give me your card and we'll all take care of you. Yes. It's really that easy.

Of course, shopping is not a uniquely American phenomenon. It has been with us glorified apes since we could exchange symbols and hence abstract symbol value from sticks and stones. But it's the inventive quality of it that astonishes. The advertising. The buorgeoning mail-box enticing you to buy. I subscribed to the New Yorker, and for that I am inundated with leaflets from the San Frnacisco Public Library, the Sierra Club, the New York Times. The marketing machine makes great plays - it's not all a running game. In America, cable tv is cheap. The catch is that every one of the 70 odd channels are basically non-stop commercials - except of course for the public channels like CSPAN.

And so here I sit, with a laptop, an iPod, a mobile phone. I could not imagine life without these essential items.

The Music Factory

So I go to the weekly beer hour at work and end up meeting this guy, James. A typical story, scientist seeking fame and glory wakes up one day to realize that he has no life other than his precious Farscape. And so, seeing life drifting by, he resolves to pick up a bass, join a band, play music, and wash that science right out of his hair. That was a couple of years ago.

Two or three bands later, James is in San Francisco. New job, new city, new apartment and in desperate need of a new band. After a timid posting to www.craigslist.org, James hooks up with a couple of soulful real-estate agents and before you know it, they are jamming and doing gigs, occasionally. Along with thousands of bands in the Bay Area. If there is one thing that defines San Francisco entertainment, it is the music scene. So far, I've seen punk bands (one of which was from Boston) retro 80's, girl punk, diy garage, english screamers, electronica and countless bland dj's. I live with a room-mate who played drums but now runs a tiny music label, my other room-mate is a graphic designer who makes snazzy band posters bands (http://www.urbaninks.com/). It turns out that all their friends are musicians. Venues here are plentiful with many triple acts (and as Meatloaf says, "2 out of 3 ain't bad"), and when me and my roomies go see some local band, I find that the bass guitarist/keyboard/drummer was once the room-mate/girlfriend/bassists/sex-slave for another band that they were in. I guess it's some kind of travelling singing salesmen problem. Or at least real-estate agents in James' case.

So I get talking with James, and feel itchy to play. (Disclosure: I was in a crappy high-school band, spending way too much time searching for that killer guitar pose, and strumming stairway to heaven in front of an imaginary pre-pubesent teenage female crowd). James' band, it turns out, is a cover band, and they're serious - i.e. practicising the same songs until they get it perfect. Well, I just wanted to play/improvise and so before you can say, are-you-a-try-hard-musician, we've organised a jam at James' rehearsal studio.

I arrive at warehouse in an industrial. It is a large box building, a no-frills warehouse. We go inside and the inside has been converted into about 30 or 40 cubicles, soundproofed. Each one, a little enclosure, an egg, an embryo. Some kind of cosmic music chicken has layed little square white eggs where future bands of America are incubating. Incubating is the right word because it's hot in that little studio, sound-proofed and black, it is a perfect heat trap.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've mucked around with music equipment - there's a whole drum-set, mikes, stands, amplifiers. Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with my cheap-ass folk guitar that I brought in Brussels. We try to mike this up but it makes such a weak sound, that it is all but inaudible when someone bangs on the drum. But I am back, making music and dreaming once again of adulating audiences.

Walking around the inside of building, one can hear dulled leakage of sounds from all the other cubicles, leaking like distilled dreams, the desires of the musicians barely contained.

The Greatest Magazine in The English Language

One of the pleasures of living in the USA is the chance to get the New Yorker at a ridiculously cheap price. True, I am living in San Francisco, pretty much the city most diametrically opposite to New York, both in geography and in culture, but there does not exist a magazine to rival the New Yorker. Here, there is the very lame San Francisco magazine. The San Francisco magazine is aimed at the the gap-dressed, yuppie upper middle class, with stories about best places to eat in the Marina [please insert your very own favorite waterfront upwardly-mobile tourist neighbourhood], and fashion tips for golf. Blah.

I don't how they make money, but if you order The New Yorker by subscription, you can save half the cover price, making it a ridiculously low $28 a year.

What makes the New Yorker great? The New Yorker gets that balance just right, between whimsical funny pieces, theatre and movie reviews, superbly written non-fiction articles of a decent length, poetry, and always a meaty piece of fiction. Especially since they changed editors a couple of years ago, who decided to focus more on current affairs. There are more serious magazines out there, but it is tiresome to read, week-in, week-out, their po-faced political analyses. I was reading my New Yorker the other day at work, strolling nonchantly down the hall when a collegue trundles over and asks to borrow my copy of the New Yorker. I say, "sure, great article today". "Oh, that's all right, I only read it for the comics"

An Army of Tori Amoses

I must confess that my favorite genre of music is that of the single female singer&songwriter. And so it goes that some of my favorite artists are Tori Amos and Ani Difranco, both of whom, you may notice, are American. Don't ever say that America is a cultural vacuum because virtually all of today's modern music comes from this big shaggy dog of a nation. Such talent does not rise up in a vacuum. For every Tori Amos found by the recording industry of America (who are flailing about in their last throes of death by suing their customers), there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of could-have-beens.

So where are these could-have-beens and should-have-beens? As the mainstream music publishing houses implode, just below the radar, a massive parallel universe of independent musicians has emerged. These guys don't sell their souls for the possibility of being a star. They control their own music, happy to make a little money, and play at small venues. Of course, until just a few years ago, the dream of selling your music yourself would have been a quick route to destitution, unless you are Ani Difranco. There's just so many fans you can reach without the helping hand of a large music company, with all the compromises that entails.

But as the technology juggernaut has barrelled forward, music distribution has changed irrevocably. Of the things I have stumbled onto, the most mind-boggling has been the web-site www.cdbaby.com. These guys sell the works of some 64,000 artists from around the world, though most are from the united states. On their site, you can download a sample of the music of all the artists, trying before buying. But most importantly, cdbaby makes sure the artists gets $6 - $12 of the price of the cd, and that the artists gets paid weekly. A successfull artist selling their cd's on this site will be able to eat.

I've been browsing this site since I discovered it about a few weeks ago. It's been a joyful experience where the only link between you and the artist is the music - no hype, no advertising, no pornography inducing you to buy. What you buy is what you hear.

The sublime irony with this new system is that to navigate your way through the world of 64,000 indepedent-minded artists who have bucked from the mainstream, one is utterly required to categorise these artists in the most meticulous way possible. It is just not physically possible to listen to everything. So to make the browsing process possible, one must narrow down the search to one's favorite genres. And even after I've narrowed down to a list of artists in the same genre, I find that I sample only those cd's where I like the cover and the blurb written about each artist.

In the end, I found myself skimming the blurbs, looking for key-words. Whilst the quality of the writing fluctuates from blurb to blurb, in the end, most of the blurbs ends up making comparisons "...if you like Tori Amos and Ani Difranco...", "she has the sweetness of early Metallica, with the banshee soulfness of Michael Bolton", "...if David Bowie was an androdgynous alien from outer space, implanted with the left lobe of Brian Eno's brain, you might get something like...".

In the end, one cannot escapes one's taste and I found myself scouring the solo female artists in folk, pop looking for artists, inspired by, sounds like, similar to, influenced by but sounds completely different from ... Tori Amos. And boy, did I find them, hundreds of them. So now I know where the army of proto-Tori Amoses can be found if I ever need to unleash a strike force of quirky emotional banshees of song and piano onto the world.

The Educated Ethnic Mosaic

So the PC police gave us a new name to describe the mixed ethnicities around us: the ethnic mosaic. Formerly known as the melting pot, the old term conjured up horrible pictures of cultural assimilation, which pained the more sensitive in our caring community. And so in came the term Ethnic Mosaic, which brings in National Geographic images of happy diverse communities, living together, somehow stronger and richer in harmony. And nowhere is it more Mosaic in the United States than right here in San Francisco.

So I look around and apart from the invisible whites, I see asians, a flood of hispanics, and a handful of blacks. Of course this varies greatly depending where I am, from the predominantly hispanic quarter of the Mission to the Asian enclave of Chinatown. But for the overall picture, it's best to turn to the US census,

"Of the 2000 population,
- an estimated 217 mil (77.1%) were White,
- 36.4 mil (12.9%) were Black or African American;
- Asians and Pacific Islanders numbered 12.7 mil (4.5%);
- and the American Indian and Alaska Native population was about 4 mil (1.5%);
- 35.3 mil (13%) were of Hispanic origin.
The Latino or Hispanic population rose nearly 13 million (or 57.9%) between the 1990 and 2000 censuses. In 2000 one half of Hispanics lived in California and Texas."

Now America has been lauded as the land of spectacular opportunity where you can suceed by pulling up your bootstraps. Now, I am working at a cushy research institute, though not the highest pinnacle of success in the United States, it's still an achievement of sorts [insert rant about the utility of a phd]. The ethnic mix at this place makes a good litmus test precisely because science is supposedly blind of all human weaknesses, and can only be seduced by The Truth.

The first thing I notice is there is nary an african-american or hispanic around, although there are spanish speakers around, who come mainly from Spain. But as I look a bit closer, I realise the security guards are mainly black, and the cleaners are hispanic. As I looked even closer, I also realised I'd made a mistake lumping postdocs and grad students. Most of the grad students fall under the white category, well-bred, healthy shiny good-time American kids, with a a surprisingly high number of asian-americans. But once you pass the barrier into the post-doc territory, there are very very few native americans. Here at my institutions, there are a lot of Europeans, Italians, Eastern Europeans seem to dominate, but I hear there are a lot more Asians across the Bay. So this begs the question, where did all the American grad students go?

I don't really know what to conclude from this. As race has been proven to be *not* a genetic property, such disparities must be social. So social as to be all but invisible.

We're Number Two

So I am working at a top US research university. How do I know? Because everyone around me says so. Not long after I arrive, I overhear this conversation.

"We're number two."

"I'm not sure about that."

"Well definitely in the top five"

"I can accept that but top two, no. Yes top five."

Well, I am glad to be at a top five place. But then I think a bit and realise that I don't know exactly what this place is the top of. Research institutes? Universities? Medical universities? I had this image of researchers swarming around the campus, like some kind of bee-surveyer, zapping random students with an instrument to measure top research potential. Perhaps they base the ranking on how many students they zap, with double the points if they zap faculty memebers.

So I think further on what might be the criteria. Is it based on research, or numbers of publications, amount of grants? Or perhaps one can measure that intangible of intangibles - prestige. After all, the conversation that spawned this conversation was entirely based on self-perception. Now I have to say at this point that I am working at a medical university even though I am doing basic science. Where, you might ask, does one put a basic research laboratory at a medical university? Easy, in Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Nevertheless, I suspect that they were talking about medical university.

But then I think to myself, perhaps the first guy was right, and we really are number two. But if we are number two, then who's number one? This question I have not yet ascertained exactly. But I have a sneaky suspicion it's John Hopkins University in Baltimore. If that's the case, then it's okay with me because I've been to Baltimore and I do not ever ever want to live in Baltimore.

Nevertheless, this obsession with rank is very important in the United States. There is a higher density of university in the United States than anywhere else in the world. There are some 2000 institutes of higher education. And given the exorbiant cost of sending your son or daughter to some of these places, you want to know that you're getting your monies worth. Hence the existence of publications like the annual issue of US News, College Guide, where all these institutes are given a concrete irreducible number. And in such a supermarket, brand recognition is everything.

The American Lexicon

Some new words I have learnt in America:

ghetto : when something is cheap and nasty. I wonder if my colleague who uses this word has actually lived in a ghetto? Has the black-white divide in this country become so transparent that a word - used formerly to describe jewish enclaves but used for for predominantly african-american and hispanic enclaves of very poor people - has become a universally identified with a degraded state of existence?

mad prop : something that works, something that is good. I cannot fathom where this word came from.

getting digits : a verb describing the act of trying to obtain a telephone number from somebody.

Straight Guy Dancing in a Gay Bar

San Francisco, gay capital of the world, where a man having an intimate conversation with a man in a bar can mean a lot more than a shared interest in the same baseball team. So the other night, I trooped off with a posse of my new friends from work. In particular there is my friend A, a sophisticated 23 year old male from West Virgina who somehow managed to develop a Euro-trash accent after spending a year abroad in Germany. A was recently been seduced by F, a feisty 29 year old Italian woman, no doubt falling irresistibly to that faux-european accent of the younger A. They were, as they say, an item.

Anyway, we arrive at this nightclub, confusingly called Cafe, which is smack in the middle of the Castro. Cafe is your typical gay bar/pick-up joint/dance club. And we had gone there to meet with some other friends, who, it so happened, were gay. We mingle and dance to the music - ranging from obligatory 80's kitch to some heavier trance beats. It's an intensely packed place in the middle of the dance floor, hot flushed bodies writhing to the beat, and this being a gay bar, any young male may, and probably will, be propositioned. And not even male. When we arrived and found our friends, one of them, a tiny indian girl was doing this dance with two tiny gay men (I presume), which I shall describe compactly as a Double Gyrating Sandwich.

My friend A, is an experience junky, or so he says, and at some point in the night, a striking gay asian man, G, with cutting cheekbones and washed blonde streaks slither from out of the crowd and sidles up to A. A enjoys the attention and excited by the homo-erotic charge starts to dance intimately mano-o-mano with G.

Meanwhile, F is dancing just adjacent pretending that this is not happening.

As hand reaches over hand, caress over caress, movements whirl into an intricate foreplay movement. The motions intensify until A has bent over backwards on the ground, knees bent, back of the head touching the ground, and G is lying prostrate over A in some kind of grinding motion.

At this point, F leaves the dance floor.

They dance some more, and when the novelty of watching A dance with G wears off, I wander off in search of F. She has moved to the opposite side of the dance-floor, dancing with our other friends.

By and by, A returns, wearing a stupid grin on his face and finding F, who does not. F does not look happy, a look of intense approbration marring her normally joyous face. For the next 20 minutes, A turns on the charm, melting the approbation right off her face. In the end all is well, but I could see the barest whisps of doubt behind those feisty Italian eyes.

Drugs drugs drugs

So I've been reading Katherine Greider's book, "The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off Its Customers", or to be specific - ripping off American Consumers. This book fills an enormous gaping hole in the literature - a compact, well-written expose of the extortionist known as the pharmaceutical industry. What better way to blackmail the consumer with the threat of death? I can't think of a better way to boost the bottom-line of my profit margin.

Lest you believe the industry's self-justifications that the cost of $10,000 for a single dose of drugs for dying AIDS victims, are simply to recoup costly R&D, Greider dissects these claims and puts it into a well-focused perspective. After all, the pharmaceutical industry is the world's *most* profitable industry, outstripping even weapons manufacturing. And most of the cost of a drug is spent on marketing. Selling directly to the consumer is but the tip of the iceberg. There are almost 100,000 salesreps out there, making good money by bribing doctors, and manipulating them into prescribing the most costly drugs instead of cheaper alternatives.

This was driven home to me the other day. It was the first time I went to my Primary Care Physician, the doctor assigned to me by my work's health insurance plan. Walking into the office, I noticed an air-hostess, or at least, I thought she was - tall, beautiful, well-groomed in a business suit, hair tied in a bun, and pulling a luggage suitcase on wheels behind her. As I was in there to make an appointment, I was quickly out of there. As I entered the elevator, the air hostess lugged her suitcase in after her. As the door closes and the elevator goes down, I look down into her suitcase, and realise that she was not an air-hostess. it wasn't a suitcase, but a shopping cart full of drugs.

Fresh tatoo

My room-mate came back with a new tattoo yesterday. It was a cover-up job - a more professional, better designed pattern - to cover the folly of a drunken kitchen hack-job. The tattoo was this intricate mechanical/organic heart organ design over the left upper part of the arm. When I first saw it, it was covered with a piece of cloth and plastic. Pus was seeming from under the plastic and a ring of blood was starting to form.

Tatooed Love

I am sitting in a bus, watching a young couple. Clean cut, well-raised, most probably operating on a high level of personal hygiene. She, with bobbed blond hair and a goofy smile. He, strong-jawed, short hair, in pastel toned clothing. The perfect middle class couple. Except for a matching pair of tattoos on the wrist of the right hand. The tattoo was essentially a word, something like "PRISNTJ". I'm guessing it might have been something in a Nordic language.

Under-dressed in San Francisco

The other night, I went down to a small punk concert with my room-mate. It was located in a small gallery, a couple of connected rooms and a tiny claustrophobic performance room. The concert consisted of a small number of punk bands, ranging from as far as Boston, the other side of the continent.

Everyone had a tatoo, and a piercing.

Certainly, this was fringe material, which attracted a fringe crowd. The crowd was a kaleidoscope of anti-fashion fashion and exaggerated individuality. In many cases, the audience appeared to have considerably more time in dressing up than the performers themselves. Velvet jackets were prominent, throwback school uniform looks. Lots of latex. And tatoos and piercings.

Except me. I was shamed. Both my room-mates have tatoos. Why didn't I have one? Was it enough of an excuse that I had only just moved here? Since then, I've kept my eyes peeled and have noticed the near ubiquity of indelible body decoration in this city. Just why is it that tatoos, formerly the domain of Hell's Angels and ex-convicts have crossed over to the fashion conscious.

It may have something to do with authenticity, an idea that one of the few non-tatooed American friends of mine had suggested. San Francisco is a city where one is pressured to be non-conformist and individual. But then it becomes ridiculously easy to be wild and crazy when it is expected of you. No one bats an eye-lid if you roar down the street with a pink mohawk in a nun's habit. Yet, this permissiveness takes away from the effort involved in being an individual. If one is expected to be wild and crazy, then one is immediately a little tame. As such, other methods are needed to show the world that you really mean it. Hence direct bodily mutilation.

We the Healthy

I have now been living in California for two months. I have exercised more in the last 2 weeks than the last 2 years combined. My poor aching bones. The fitness fever - it surrounds you, it embalms you, thousands upon thousands of fitness fanatics with their talk of carbs and aerobics and running and power and rock climbing. It's inescapable due largely to do the excellent stridently sunny weather and the the large green open spaces. Then there is that surface venner of good Californian smiley feeley West Coast cheer. Cheering you on to self-actualisation, to spirituality, and to good wholesome exercise.

For a city known for its back-breaking hills, San Francisco is a bike city. Down from the hills, there are large regions of flat, bikable plains. There are many bike shops, and like everything else, bikes are fashion accessories. There are bikes that are stylish expressions of the self. Curvy metalic mobile sculptures, with their Easy-Rider handlebars and their earthy low centres-of-gravity. Well-marked bike lanes criss-cross the cities, ferrying socially-aware bike-riders from one hot-bed of activism to another. Yes, biking is a green form of transport.

On weekends, people from work go mountain-biking, rock-climbing, recreational (?) running, ultimate friss-beeing. If you don't sweat or hit the zone, you're not having fun. For me, I have fallen victim to the soccer fever. Every week on a Monday and Wednesday afternoons, we descend onto the pathetic patch of green outside the building to play this quintinsensually un-American game, even though it is. Soccer is played big time in primary and high-school, but there is no professional league. More importantly, it's a popular game for girls to play. So it's a wonderfully mixed gender game we play.

Spelling Bee

I was bored one night, and I stumbled onto the broadcast of the annual National Spelling Bee that's been going on since 1925. Of course, it was broadcast on ESPN, the sports channel. Held at the Grand Hyatt, Washington DC this year, I watched a procession of young children, aged from 9 to maybe 15, all sitting in the chairs behind a stage wearing a huge garish yellow sign stating school and district. Each child, in turn, was called up to the front of the stage where a Matt Damon look-a-like would utter a very obscure and useless word. The child will then, depending on temperament and recognition, look shell-shocked or gloating, and proceed to ask one of a number questions.

"Can I get alternative pronounciation"

"What is the definition of the word?"

"Is there an alternative definition?"

"What's the pronounciation agaiun?"

"Can you give me th origin of the word?"

"Use the word in a sentencel"

The Matt-Damon clone will then drone on and on in response to these questions. Meanwhile four other judges sitting adjacent to the stage will check that Matt-Damon and/or the children have indeed pronounced the word quickly.

For the child that has no clue, the child will stall by asking the question again. It is a weird atmosphere where the whole hall is silent, allowing the child complete focus on his performance. Then the child will attempt to the spell the word. After completing the spelling, the child will wait anxiously for the absence of the bell. A clear ring sounds failure.

Choose your cheque

So here I was, in the bank, ready to open a bog-standard bank account - a relatively easy thing to do. the nice friendly banker had gone through the details and when he got to the point where he explained how checks work as I had never had a checking account before. "Oh americans love checks." I nodded as we went through the details, and then he said, "while i'm doing the paperwork, why don't you choose the design you like". With that he handed me this large folder and proceeded to do his paperwork.

Now, I normally find making decisions over things that have no consequence really quite difficult. I freeze up. I had hundereds of cheque designs to choose from. At the front were the children (?) orientated designs. Have your favourite disney character. There were coca-cola cheques, nascar cheques. Have your favourite nascar driver smiling at you everytime you sign away from money. trees, nature, god, crosses. There were so many that I was so overwhelmed that I chose the most non-descript cheque possible. It was non-descript that when I later signed a cheque to my room-mate, she thought it must have been a temporary cheque. The reassuring "personal" character of your personal cheques must be masking some kind of sub-terranean river of anxiety of money.

Apple is taking over San Francisco

It's scary. Everywhere I look around me, there is a mac. Yes, they are attractive, with their sleek aluminium frame and their slim elegant design and their overt emphasis on eye-candy. Of course, the san-francisco state of mind is hi-tech and artisitic and the mac caters to that.

What is surprising is that here, at UCSF, one of the bastions of higher education, the macintosh is slowly tightening its vice-like grip. I see around me, postdocs who are toying with the idea of updating the laptops, being continually bombarded with lots of sly suggestions. "oh the mac is so much cooler". there is only so much resistance to coolness peer pressure that an average science nerd can take. the secret is the adoption of unix for the apple os x. With unix under the hood, it is quite simple, even elementary to run academic software. Plus, you can connect your iPod up.

Speaking of the iPod, the mini-iPod got released recently and news is that the first run got completely sold out. Not coincindentally, Apple finally opened an Apple store in downtown San Francisco. It is perhaps a little surprising that there hasn't been one in San Francisco since it is after all, the home of Apple but we should keep in mind that the real home is down south in Palo Alto, not the seedy shopping thrall of downtown.

The Golden Hostel Experience

I have now spent a week in a San Francisco and really enjoyed the hospitality that this city has to offer. In particular, a very drunk person one night fell sleep in the bunk bed above me and at around two o'clock at night, let his bladder loose on his generic YHA mattress, which subsequently soaked through the mattress and greeted me with a golden shower. I was at the time, half awake with fever because I'd contracted the flu that was going round and witnessed the whole watery event cascading on my body.

What happened to me at the Baltimore airport

So here I am at the Baltimore airport. I arrived early as the airline suggested and rested easy in the lounge outside, amongst many other obvious delegates of the conference from which I attended. I drift off and doze a bit, try to read, drift off again and in the end decide to listent to some music.

So I rifle through my backpack and find my discman and put on my favorite Tori Amos cd, putting the volume at a loud enough volume to drown out the deadening murmur of the airport. At some point, about 10 minutes before boarding time, I decide to stand up and stretch my legs. I scan the area and notice a newsagent. I walk into the newsagent, whilst listening to my discman, lost in a world of music.

Anyway, I am in the shop, browsing a few magazines, maybe some Linux magazines, maybe Time and as I feel the time of the boarding come, I turn around to leave.

I turn around to find that the shop-keeper had pulled in all the newspaper stands, looked the shop and left.

I panic. I try to open the gate. I start to yell outat the first person to come by. "Help! I've been locked. Find someone. Please." Fortunately it wasn't a hard door and sound penetrated through. He is a small asian businessman and looks somewhat startled but manages to find an airline staff.

The airline staff is a homely woman and as she approaches the newsagent, she doesn't see me at first, as there is a large newspaper stand.

"I can't believe it", she said. She tells me that the shop shouldn't be closed but that doesn't help me somehow. She tries to ring the manager, whilst I try to get a grip on myself. Another airline staff comes by. The try to open to security roll-a-day but find that it is secure. They discuss various thing including sticking a screw-driver into the servo-mechanism. The woman tries to ring the newsagent general manager.

I try to explain what happened and that my plane, which is just adjacent is leaving.

One of the other airline staff, a portly moustached man arrives, mumbles something about the police, rings them. "Look, there is a customer who get locked. No. This is not a crank call. We're trying to contact someone with a key".

Just 10 minutes before the plane leaves someone arrives, a short asian woman wearing a floral shirt arrives and unlocks the door. As the roll-a-door slowly unwinds up, I spring as quick I can and race towards the plane, which is no more than 10 metres away, just around the corner.

Immigration

Fear is standing at the borders of a trigger-happy country without your legal papers.

I had confidently approached the immigration counter, handed over my pass-port, even showed the nice officer where my J1 visa form was crudely stapled in my passport. Knowing that this officer was the bulwark that shielded Americans from fear, it was crucial that my paperwork be in order. It didn't hurt that I tried to appear inoffensive and safe. The immigration officer had found all to his satisfaction, and then asked for my DS-2019 form, the most important form to enter the US for us J1 visa holders.

Embarassed that I hadn't got it out, but knowing exactly where it was, I quickly rifled through the stack of papers I had accumulated in my travels. On my first pass, I couldn't find it. I looked for it again. I couldn't find it. I start to have a mini heart attack.

"I'm sorry sir, but you will have to go to secondary."

I did end up finding my DS-2019. I had forgotten that I had left it in an envelope and thus missed the envelope as I searched through my stack of documents. But too late, the immigration officer had already sent me on my way to the secondary.

Cinema in Paris

Some have said that the French have a passion for cinme. Now, I have seen this with my own eyes and I can vouch that it is true.

I was hanging out with Olivier, my good friend in Paris who is letting me crash at his flat, when as the youth of all first world countries tend to do when dthey want to do something, they go to the movies. Taking pity of my poor command of even tourist French, Olivier suggested we see an English movie. They even suggested that we should watch it in le Version Original. All good.

However, what struck me was that it was easy to see a foreign film (albeit in this case it was the lingua franca of the modern world - English) and foreign films were marketed right alongisde the mainstream film. No seedy foreign film cinemas tucked away in Paddington or Newtown. You can watch English films right in the heart of St-Michel, one of the trendier suburbs of Paris. Furthermore, the first English film that was suggested was that big Hollywood blockbuster Mulloluhand Drive. That's right. A David Lynch film.

Unfortunately, when we got to St Michel, we found the cinema full. I could barely believe it. A David Lynch film packing out the cinemas? Granted - it was a lesbian flesh flick with Freudian overtones. So we had to reconsider our options. Now in Paris apparently, if you can't find a David Lynch film, then the next best thing is - a Woody Allen film. Explain this to me: what has a neurotic 90 something New York Jew got to do with reggae playing Parisian boys? Probably a lot.

Fortunately, we just make it into this cinema. The first thing I notice that's different is that the cinema is full. No, let me explain. The cinema is full. A Woody Allen movie has packed out the cinema. Hello. Is that strange? The second thing I notice is that before the movie starts, there is an usual level of background noise. In Ozzie cinemas there's normally a lot of shuffling or some loudmouth talking but in this cinema, the noise is the sound of the whole cinema being engaged in involved conversation. As a result individual voices are not heard but there are many people conversing such that it all coalesces into a low hum of French syllables.

As soon as the movie starts I'm thrown into the bliss of hearing uninterrupted English. It's then when I realise how I've missed the constant sounds of my native tongue. For the last week I've felt like a parrot who only knows one phrase - Polly wants a cracker? Qu'est ce-aue voulez-vous? Polly wants a cracker? Comment vous-allez? Polly wants a cracker? Ou etes d'ou? Polly wants a cracker? Do you speak English? Polly wants a ... er, yes I do.

During this time I almost convince myself that I am back in Australia. But there is something distinctly different (apart from the French sub-titles). This audience laughs at the jokes. I mean most of the audience gets the jokes and laugh at the same time. Like a laugh track. I'm thinking this is odd. Ozzie audiences either don't get all of the jokes - except the slapstick ones, or, they don't enjoy laughing out loud. I don't feel out of place blurting out my cacophanous sounds in such a cinema.

It's not until the end of the film do I realise that this Woody-Allen-literate audience don't even speak English as their first language.

The French truly love their film. Ahhh I have found the place to watch film.

Ironic that the French, who are so proud of their culture, have a such a soft spot for that American cultural imperialist Woody Allen.

Bread

Europeans take their bread seriously. Very seriously. In the supermarket, bread takes up a large section of the supermarket. This is because the peoples expect fresh bread, even in a supermarket. Always, there is a wall that has been converted into the bread display case, clear plastic drawers where you can see the (uncut) loaves. Examine it. Discern it. Critique it. And choose it. There is a bewildering variety of choice. Recipes from different regions, white, grey, wholemeal, bioorganic.

But the next step is the best bit. You take your loaf out of the basket and place it into...A BREAD CUTTING MACHINE. Open the lid, dump the loaf and press the big green button. The machine chuggs into action and your previously virginal uncut loaf now pops out as a sliced up proto-sandwich bread.

But perhaps where the bread fetish is taken to extremes is in your average sandwich diner. In any sandwich diner worth it's salt, there is a large, semi-industrial sized oven where ... all bread rolls, pastries, croissants are baked on-site. As you order your sandwich, you will be safe in the knowledge that the bread you eat just came out of the oven.

Biker models police downtown Cologne

Just visited Cologne, a lovely little town near the western border of Germany. Cologne (or Koln with two funny dots over the o and pronounced kern) boasts a stunning Gothic cathedral (finished last century), that sits squat in the middle of the city. shops crowd up to the cathedral and the train station is just next door. Everytime I strayed from a side street and stumbled onto the main street, the cathedral would burst into my view of vision and take my breath away.

Cologne is relaxed and just lovely to stroll through. It was on one of these strolls that I saw the future of urban policing. How do I describe them? Imagine a young sporty photogenic couple. Deck them out in the latest bike gear - lurid bike pants, high-tech contoured helmets and riding shoes. Give them each the latest in urban moutain bikes.

Then, blaze the "police" logo down the side, put on a funky style jacket. As it's uncomfortable wearing a belt with skin-tight bikepants, let the gun hang loose from the hem of the jacket. And finally, let those handcuffs dangle from the, quite trendite, jacket.

This is the uber-polizei of the 21st century.

English: the French connection

Remembering that the Normans (now part of northern France) invaded and conquered England in the 12th century illuminates much about the English language. Half of it is made up of latin words. Now that I'm learning French, odd words here and there reveals even more of the history of the Norman invasion. After the invasion, the Normans killed every English aristocrat they could find and replaced them with French lords. As such, in French, to ask is "demander", whereas in english, "demand" means to order. In French, to tell one to stop, or stick 'em up, one uses "se rendre". In English, to give up is to "surrender".

Life in Brussels

Finally, after some 2 months in Brussels, my life has settled into some kind of normality. I have found me a room in Sablon, perhaps the most expensive part of Brussels. There are antique shops with weightily priced ugly old furniture. Bars are definitely on the boutique side and the buildings have been impressively maintained in the ancient state. My room is on the third floor of a relatively steep staircase and it looks out onto the facade of a 17th century church. The church tolls on the hour (supposedly) and the sound always washes in through my window.

My room is large and airy with big windows looking over the church. It's wooden floor boards. The room is remarkably inexpensive for where it is. I got very lucky. Out of 7 phone numbers that Xavier, from work, helped me find. This was the only one. My flatmates are Michel, a 35 year old stock-broker who has been severley house-broken and often works from home. His parter, Victoria, a immigrant from Moldavia, a tiny tin-pot state split off from the former USSR. And Frabrice, who is, a musician-cum-agricultural-engineer-cum-international relations officer. Together we share the apartment which Michel rules with an iron fist, in the nicest possible way. All the worldly modern amenities are there.

Every morning, I wake, tumble downstairs, and stroll on faded cobble-stones, past some of the nicest parts of Brussels to Central Station. I stroll past the Belgian Congress, Belgian National Library, the Art Gallery, a huge plaza with a statue of a horse and rider, of whose identity, I know not.

I take a train to the university, which is about an hour from Brussels. Half of the transit consists of a big circle getting out of the city and the other half is through the most delightful Belgian countryside. It is a montage of rolling green hills, clustered villages of aging cottages, dead threadbare trees and gentle flowing rivers. I can enjoy this view everyday, everyday that is, when the weather permits. The weather in Belgium (and all of low-land Europe at that) is a filthy overcast day with the possibility of rain. When there is a sunny day, it is so unusual that people comment on it. "It's a nice day". "Yep...it is a nice day".

Dublin

A few weeks ago, I visited Dublin. Land of the Gaelic tongue, rolling hills, spires of rocks and spectacular coastlines. Or so I thought. Dublin is almost completely anti-thecal to how I had imagined it. The economic prosperity that has swept Ireland has remolded the face of Dublin. About ten years ago, Dublin was a very poor, very run-down kind of place. That is almost un-imaginable walking down current day Dublin. It's full of big department stores, cafes on every corner, trendite restaurants with exotic food from every corner of the globe and sophisticated electronic stores. It's the European silicon valley with cyber-cafes everywhere, and a high-density of dot-com startups. A far cry from the cobble-stone poverty of Joyce. The few indications of the grinding oppresion of the former English over-lords is a series of paintings in the stately post office in the centre of the city. The paintings illustrate the Rebellion, which in a manner of the Irish, failed.

So how did Ireland, only Dublin really, manage to bootstrap its way out of its Eastern European style of life? It did the savvy thing and joined the EU really early on. For the last ten years, money has been flowing into Ireland via Brussels to kick-start the Irish economy. And then the Irish Government made decided to aggressively court the i.t. sector. We're talking ten year tax free, or nearly tax free, status to i.t. corporations. My good friend, Ned, was working at Media-Lab Europe - in Dublin. Yes, that's the same MediaLab as the one at M.I.T., which has Chomsky as a director (MediaLab Europe has Bono as one of the Directors). The Irish Government GAVE AWAY a whole building AND LOTS OF MONEY, to entice MediaLab to to set up camp in Dublin. But we're not talking any old building. We're talking the OLD GUINESS HOP-STORE. What had happened was that about 40 years ago, Guiness worked out a new way of brewing their beer which took up 70% less space. As a result, they just vacated these massive Guiness factories in the middle of Dublin. The Dublin government has since been trying to work out what to do with them do. Give them away, yay.

The Irish (in Dublin) are not quite as friendly as I imagined them. But the astonishing thing about Dublin is the intensity of their pub-life (in comparison to the placid feel of Belgian pubs). Every Friday, Saturday night, every, and I do mean every, pub is filled to the rafters. Punters just enjoying the tactile presence of bodies jammed up against their drinking hole. According to Ned, the truly authentic Irish pub must have disgusting non-descript carpets, ornate decorations along the walls, and mis-matched antique lights swinging from the ceiling. And yes, Guiness is better in Ireland than out.

Ireland is a literate country. Maybe I'm biased. I was starved of affordable books in Brussels, and bought 10 books in Ireland, which were on discount. Being literate also means giving a tax break to artists. No artist in Ireland has to pay tax! As for literacy, the most famous exhibit in Dublin - the Book of Kells. It is great, but it's not that interesting as you only get to see eight pages of the book under glass. However, I maintain that the best thing I saw in Dublin, was the Long Room at Trinity College. It was an adjunct exhibit to the book of Kells exhibit. The Long Room is a stunning antique library in Trinity College. Dark and sombre, there are two split levels of floor-to-ceiling cup-boards all filled with beautiful, hard-cover, hand-made books. The room is massive and the wood-panelling is finished with a sophisticated sheen. A heavy air hangs over the room.

Nevertheless, once you stray out of the global zone, the old Dublin exerts itself. Rows upon rows of incredibly monotonic Victorian builidings fill the suburbs. Actually, calling them buildings would be a compliment. Brick boxes with windows would much more accurate. It would seem that the English didn't desire to build very well in Dublin. I wonder why. As an example of the Cathololcism that grips Ireland, while I was there, there was a roaring debate over a proposed new bill. This bill wanted to legalise abortion - for women who were clinically depressed and had said that they wanted to kill themselves. Now, the interesting things is, both for and against were pro-lifers. It would be unthinkable to position yourself any other way. A final point, I have never ever seen so many mothers with prams taking their kids onto public transport in my life. Dublin is a perpetual Young Mothers Associaton Conference.

A Shorter History of Belgium

As a I found myself preparing to live in this country, I saw it as my duty to find out more about the history of Belgium, a country more important than its size suggests, sandwiched between the larger nations of Europe. Of course, when I first enquired about the history of Belgium, all the Belgians I asked would answer « Oh, it's terribly complicated » and then proceed not to enlighten me much about it at all. The Belgians have a sense of poltical turmoil in-grained into them that mirrors the political traumas inflicted on their beloved country. And it is as much in the younger generation as in the older generation. Nevertheless, they had a boundless faith that Belgium will prevail. I was fascinated.

So I trooped off to one of two English bookstores in Brussels and found this one book, "A Political History of Belgium from the 1830's". White, bare with a single chess piece of the front. It was just what I was looking for. This book was originally published in Flemish and has now been translated into English after winning some acclaim in academic circles. No wonder, it was a somewhat dry, pedestrian historical overview, filled with a procession of mind-numbingly endless number of dates, figures and acronyms, sprinkled through with marxist jargon and neo-liberal technicalities in a bizarre attempt to drum up some passion. This is a book that reflects the Belgian character. And I was told by the erstwhile bookseller that it had been selling quite well. I had to buy it.

So where lies the complexity ? Simply put, since its inception in 1830, Belgium has been continually pulled in six different political directions, each of them dominating and then receding in turn. These are, in no particular order – Walloonia, Flanders, Catholicism, Socialists, Liberal-Capitalists, and the King.

The whole of Belgium, including Luxembourg, used to be ruled by Holland – by the House of Orange. When Revolutionary fever broke, the region that is now Belgium spontaneously revolted and tried to set up a Republic. The revolution was motivated by hatred of the House of Orange and so, the newly created Republic did not split along ethnic lines.

But it turns out that setting up a repulblic is not so straight-forward. What with Dutch speaking Flanders in the north and French speaking Walloonia in the south and some tiny German speaking part that I know nothing about, the creation of the new Republic required a lot of international deal-making, much as the state of Israel was created. With mainly the backing of France, who wanted to see a joker of a nation buffering them from Holland, Belgium became reality. However, admist the turmoil of nation building, and perhaps, with a not-so-distant memory of a Repulic backed Napolean rampaging through the lands, at the last moment, the people of the soon-to-become Republic decided that they wanted a Monarchy instead.

So a king had to be found. Thus, Leopold found himself elevated suddenly from a plain old member of the German aristocracy to a King. Leopold was diplomatic, cultured and had the right political views so as not to offend Dutch, French, English and German power brokers. The King possessed powers akin to the current President of the United States –appointing ministers, signing laws and dictating foreign policy – except that the title of King flowed from father to son, unlike the United States. This King made political neutrality –surprise, surprise - the cardinal virtue of Belgian foreign policy. The new King was also quite accomodating to the Catholic Church and rich land owners. This may have something to do with the very expensive electoral tax, without which you could not vote at all.

Until the first World War, Belgian politics was dominated by the struggle between the Catholics and the Liberals to dominate the government. The Catholics were constantly trying to re-consolidate a power that they had lost under Dutch rule and the Liberals were trying to establish a buorgeois secular captialist state. The most pointed political battles centred around control of education. A battle which the Catholics clearly won. The Catholics dominated this era but by the First World War, there were enough prosperous middle class Belgians to undermine Catholic support. With such a strong Catholic background, is it surprising that Belgium is not exactly a country renown for its easy-going progressive nature ?

After Universal Suffrage near the turn of the centry, the Great Depression and the Second World War, where the King took Belgian neutrality to ridiculously new heights, the Belgian Socialists managed to absorb workers discontent and Communist zealotry to become a significant political force in Belgian politics. The Socialists managed to under-write a working welfare state after the Second World War in Belgium. Nevertheless, the Socialists were always viewed with suspicion by the Liberals and the Catholics. Indeed ever since the First World War, there has been a merry go-round succession of coalition governments. Just after the Second World War, there was even a laughable Liberal-Catholic-Socialist-Communist minority coalition government. That one didn’t last too long.

The role of the King took a battering especially after he bet on the wrong horse during the Second World War. Although secular groups didn’t want the King back after he went on a self-imposed exile, the conservative nature of the Belgians exerted itself. Royal anxiety won the day and the King was asked back. However, given the acrimonous atmosphere over his conduct in the Second World War, the King abdicated in favour of his son, who was still under-age, thus ensuring that his son would get the throne with a clean slate. Since then the Royal family has slowly devolved itself to a skeletal, almost symbolic function. But every so often, the King would wade into the political quagmire. The one famous example was when King Badouin decided that he could not sign the abortion law passed by parliament, him being a good Catholic and all. Parliament was in a quandry. They couldn’t force the issue without engendering a constitutional crisis. What could they do ? What would you do ? That’s right, declare a coup d’etat for a a few hours, sign the law themselves, and then immediately re-instate the King (compare this to Australia where the Queen’s representatives simply dissolves parliament).

After being invaded twice, both times by Germany, Belgium decided that it was probably time to re-think it’s political neutrality. After the Second War, Belgium became one of the most vigorous proponents of NATO. Belgium couldn’t offer up its sovereignty to the the gentle patronage of the United States fast enough. And being a tiny inconsequential military nation smack in the middle of Europe, it was a most logical place to situate the headquarters of NATO. Having a bilingual capital sealed it. Brussels is now a wonderfully international city. It’s fantastic when the train attendant switches to flawless English when he sees that you are embarassing yourself with futile attempts to parler francais. From there on, it was natural that more and more of European power would accrete in Belgium. Indeed, the Belgians are so blasé about their role as European nexus that when the Belgian parliament first came together to vote for the Maastricht Treaty to bring in the Euro, they couldn’t even make chorum. This is the same Treaty that caused the hair to turn grey in politicians in other European nations.

But by far the most trauma that the Belgians have inflicted upon themselves has been the language split. Carved out of the old Dutch empire, you have the predominantly Catholic Dutch Flanders in the north and Liberal French Walloonia in the south and the capital Brussels is a region unto its own. When Belgium was first created, Belgium was predimonantly French. It was the French liberals who played the biggest part in the Revolution. It was the French capitalist who profited most from the new government. Brussels was French. It was understood that you had to speak French if you wanted a position of power.

Unfortunately two things happened. Over the last 100 years, industry shifted from the mining industries of Wallonia to the manufacturing and shipping of Flanders, thereby re-arranging the economic landscape. And the Flemish bred much faster the Walloons. Suddenly the Dutch speaking Flemish had both money and more people. Yet the people who ruled them often couldn’t even talk to them. There were furious battles over education. Since all government positions were assumed to be French speaking, the Belgium government saw no need for a Dutch university. Dutch-speaking soldiers in the Belgium army sometimes had no idea what commands the French-speaking officers were giving them. This caused a few problems during the War.

Although always a festering sore, the language problem simmered to a compromise by the Second World War when bilingual status was officially adopted. But oh what a compromise. It wasn’t a simple bilinguallism for all. That would have been too difficult. Instead, each county would count the number of Dutch and French speakers in their area and register with the central authorities as Dutch or French. Consequently different government departments would liase with that county. Different documents, teachers, officials would apply depending on the language registered. As you can imagine, there were all sorts of shenanigans with county boundaries, methods of counting and disgruntled minorities - around Brussels especially where the demographics would change violently from year to year.

The whole thing came to a head in the 70’s, timing fortuituously with the oil-crisis led recession and the subsequent neo-liberal back-lash. Along with a swing to the hard-right, the language issue fissured completely. In many a county, conservative single language speakers who refused to speak the tainted other language despite the official classification would get voted in. This was but the tip of the ice-berg. All three major political parties – Catholics, Liberals, and Socialists - decided to split along ethnic lines. Indeed, all of them felt that they performed better apart (figure that out ?). So from a three party system, you suddenly had a six party system.

Better yet, admist all this confusion - where there was talk of Flanders going back to Holland and Walloonia going back to France and Brussels joining Tintin on the moon - people decided that maybe they didn’t want a central government anymore. Then a most remarkable thing. The Belgians voted for a series of constitutional changes that devolved their country from a strong nation state into a loose con-federation of counties. All for none and something for everyone. What does that entail ?

What the Belgians did was to take the traditional split of the levels of government and completely re-organised the balance of power between them - the national government, regional government and counties. First, the finances for the different levels were completely re-vamped. The two lower levels of government were suddenly allowed to tax a citizen a lot more. In Belgium, paying taxes is a complex process where one has to pay a national tax, a regional and a city tax. Although there is legislation that dictates the range of taxation, city councils governments can impose quite a substantial personal income tax. And it can differ enormously depending where you live. In Brussels, the capital, the city tax is quite high. In the country-side, they are much lower. Second, certain national ministeries were disbanded and corresponding regional ministries were created. In particular, cultural and education ministeries were broken up into Brussels, Flanders and Walloonia. It was recognised that the three different regions were too diverse to have a national program and that the dominant language in each region created a distinctly unique culture. Education was also regionalised, given how important that a language is too basic education. Third, proportial representation was vastly increased at all levels of government. Given that Belgium has some 9 million people, Belgium has as many politicians for the national and state governments as the United States of America - a nation of 250 million people.

So where does this lead Belgium? Less unity it seems but a stronger society perhaps. Obviously such drastic changes reflected deep schisms in Belgium society. Yet most Belgians are deeply conservative. For typical Belgians, the constitutional reforms seem like a fix to a problem. Perhaps the model of Belgium society is one fit for Europe. However, I think a fix is all there is. My friend at work was helping me cart some stuff from Flanders Antwerp to here, Wallonia Gembloux. Talking to the guy at the other end of the phone, they found that they could converse better in English. Bilingualism has faded away for the triumph of the global tongue.

Hanover

I am spending the weekend in Hanover, the former capital of the glorious Prussian empire - the birthplace of the British Royal Family. It's my first foray into Germany and my conclusion is that everything they say about the German character is true. The evidence - German trains are the best, comfortable, well organised and everthing looked onto a well-oiled timetable. This in itself would mean nothing. But as we pulled into Koln; the German way imposed it's will on me.

First, the Koln train station is a hyper-realised example of Usefulness. Who needs a facade or an imposing building? All you need is a skeletan structure of cast-iron ribbing to keep the rain off. Then I wonder down into the guts of the station, expecting the usual smattering of dodgy food stalls, cafe's and station bars. Instead, I found a ... shopping centre. How practical! I thought as I slapped my head on the face. It makes immense sense. People travel to buy things. Let's cut the distance from the station to the goods. Just hop off the station and buy. Furthermore, you alleviate the problem of empty and dangerous railway stations as you can easily combine the security forces of both the shopping centre and the railway station thereby making it safer for all.

Now don't think this is peculair to Koln as when I arrived in Hanover, it was exactly the same. Yes, the same no nonsense hardheaded realism that makes life richer and more joyful for greater numbers of Germans.

Once into Hanover, I met Sebastien, a former flatmate from sunny Sydney. I met up with his friends who then apologised for how boring Hanover is. But it's not. I walked around Hanover and there was much to see. Hanover had the absolutely shit bombed out of it in the Second World War and the Hanoverrians have done a remarkable job restoring it. Old churches reconstructed, buildings from different areas carefully restored. Hanover boasts a lovely town hall from the days of the old Hapsburg empire. There were also leftovers from the Nazi regime, an eternal reminder of darker days.

The undeniable jewel of Hanover is the public transport system. Their buses are brightly coloured boxes that roam around the city powered by bio-gas - that's right horseless carraiges powered by pig-shit. After all Germany at the moment is jointly governed by the Greens which is slowly falling apart. The buses are big and roomy with large windows, all the better to see the sights of Hanover with. The seating arrangement is diverse and you can face whichever way you want and there is even a section separated for the back-of-the-bus people. Raised a bit higher and seats that face each other. A group of drunken Germans can be drunk together at the back of the bus whilst only minimally disturbing the rest of the passengers. And Hanover boasts one of the more arresting bus-stops I have seen. I can only describe it as a large vertical wok.

However, I was most impressed with their integrated tram/train/sub-way system. Some streets in Hanover have been designated as tram-only streets. Given that these trams hurtle around the streets at a rather disconcerting speed, god help any little old ladies who hobble across the street with their walking frames. These same trams then enter the sub-way system in the inner city where they accelerate into angry beasts of the underground. As it is unseely for sub-ways not to have platforms, the train/trams have a dual entry system where the exits extend horizontally to meet the platforms in the sub-way, whereas as trams, they trans-former away into steps that lead onto level ground. Finally, when these trams head into the outskirts, they can suddenly accelerate up to 100 km/hours to reach the nether regions of Hanover, the old Expo 2000 site for instance.

And finally, a few words about German cuisine. It's not true that Germans don't know how to eat. I'm a bit of a fan of the old Bratwurst and in Germany, there are sausage stores everywhere. They serve it perfectly. A big long sausage is served on a tiny little of bun - a most pleasing ratio of sausage to bread with a generous dollop of mustard. And you can yummy matjes fillets on bread.

Snow

Coming from a harsh dry place like Australia, you never see the snow. The first time I saw snow I was in La Charmee, a tiny village in the south-east of France in Bourgonne. It was at night and pitch dark all around. By turning on the outside light of the house I saw large white flakes drifiting down from the heavens above forming this unbelievable layer on the ground. Because of the lack of light, the snow seemed to have been attracted to light as flies drift towards the mozzie killer - zap-zap, zap-zap. Cast over the countryside was this blanket of white, yet the snow would artistically arrange itself on every branch, rock and stone. Walking in the snow produces a crunching noise just this side of the sound of nails on a blackboard.

Falling snow is kind like a hug not haranguing like rain. The flakes of snow wraps gently around your clothing before melting and saturing through your body to freeze you to death.

Noel en La Charmee

I now know how Christmas is supposed to be celebrated. Here I was, stuck in Paris, nowhere to go, missing kinda that familial atmosphere that is one's birthright in the time of Christmas. When, my friend Olivier offers to take me back to his family's home for Christmas. Of course I accepted. I was no fool.

So we travel some 9 hours deep into the south-east of France (the trains in France are excellent). We change trains at Dijon and make our way to Lyon. From Lyon we get picked up by Olivier's mom and her irascible neighbour and we head out into the pastoral fields. As we travel, the population density drops. Lyon has some million people. Then we pass through Chalon-sur Soane, which has 60,000 and finally we turn into a tiny road into La Charmee, a small village of maybe 60 families. By this time it was dark and when we pulled up into the family house, it loomed into me out of the frail light of the little car. Namely, a 200 year old French cottage complete with stone walls, big country windows and a roaring fire inside the house.

The house was thankfully warm as all houses tend to be in Europe in winter - may you never suffer a power blackout in Europe in winter. A large large room that was both living room and dining room took up the lower floor whilst the bedrooms made up the top floor. Simple design, a delight to live in.

Then onto Christmas dinner proper. In this case, Olivier's mom, his aunty and her partner, Olivier's brother and grandmother made up the company. And of course, the token Australian. For starters, we chomped on this kind of cheese-pastry, a minituaire cabbage called an ondive, and some guacamole (Olivier's mother thinks fusion but cooks francais). Then we talk for half an hour, or in my case, listen. Every so often, they'll ask me something in kindergarten french and my face will contort into thinking mode and then I'll spray out a sentence of dog-french. Painful, yet fastly enjoyable as everyone would roar in sympathetic laughter.

Now, I have been looking forward to the second course all day. It was foie gras, translated, it means 'liver fatty'. Story goes that hunters found that geese killed just before the winter migration had particularly delicious livers - larger, plumper with a smoother texture. Consequently, those wilely frenchman realised that you can forcefeed geese to simulate the storage of food for winter and then slaughter them for their livers to make foie gras. Foie gras is the jewel of peasant French cuisine. Normally beyond the reach of the average French family, Olivier's sisters had pulled some favours from a gourmet chef friend of hers. I was told that such 'ostentation' is reserved only for the yuletide celebrations in families such as Olvivier's.

As for the foie gras itself: it's pure liver of which I am not sure if it was cooked or not packed into a block with some kind of jelly through it. In effect, it is a solid chunck of liver. Sliced, everyone was served one special piece. It is special because it has the smoothest texture that melts in your mouth whereas the test has a very strong flavour that I find it hard to describe to people who don't normally eat internal organs. And of course, we were served bread. Lots of bread. And there was a special wine, specially recommended for foie gras - white, light and very sweet. The first tasting was the best. It was almost as enjoyable watching Olivier eat his foie gras as eating it myself. Like a prisoner tasting his first sight of freedom, Olivier tasted his first portion of foie gras.

We talk for another hour and then moved onto the next course.

Which was, baked small potatoes and a, of all things, kangaroo casserole. I have a feeling that the French probably eat more kangaroos than Australians. Australians feel weirded out to think of eating their coat of arms. But I say, what better way to assimilate than to partake in our national mascot in a material way. And we ate more bread and drank more wine.

Then we talk some more. And out comes the cheese. There was camembert, two types of goat cheese, and a nice hard mature cheese with a sliver of blue through the middle. And we ate the cheese with bread. And more bread. By the end of the dinner I was an expert at ripping out a healthy chunk of bread from the stick of baguette.

To finish off, after talking some more, out came two large baskets of profitterole kind of things. If memory serves me correct, then they were called chou de creme, or cabbage of cream. There was vanilla and chocolate. Whoa-hoa-hoa I didn't know if I could fit any more in but I trooped ahead and consumed to my delight and my stomach's demise.

Then there was more bread and coffee. After that was some present opening etc