I present to you, dear readers, one of my favorite stupid and nonsensical things in my part of Paris:



This place is right down the street from me, just below Place Blanche, where the Moulin Rouge is. Note they even put a Scarface poster on the door in case you didn't get the reference. What I wish they'd put up is a poster explaining why they're making the reference.

If I had a time machine and a date, I'd take it and her to le Café de L'Enfer.



I first heard of this place a few years ago when I was living in Philadelphia with Ben and he knocked on my bedroom door one evening to show me the below photo in the latest National Geographic. (I just found the writeup in their website archives here.) It's good to have friends who know what you like.


Why, just look at those old-timey fools enjoying a drink in Hell. What I wouldn't give to hang out there. The café was in Montmartre and I had no idea at the time I'd end up living here just a few years later; I'm 99% sure the place was right on the Boulevard de Clichy (edit: it was), which is about fifty paces from my front door. I certainly wish it were still there (and everyone still dressed like that).

Here are some other images I've found from the around the web...





Some joker apparently got the idea to open up another café called Le Ciel (heaven) nextdoor. Tell me, which one looks like more fun to you?



Lastly, here's an amazing photo a friend of mine gave me that I still need to get a frame for. It's beautiful; about 8.5" x 11".

My neighborhood, Pigalle, has a reputation for being gross and seedy and dishonest and crime-ridden, and I suppose it is all of those things a lot of the time; there are aggressive drug dealers and pickpockets and beggars everywhere (not to mention the groups of thugs just standing around to mess with you me), the main boulevard is full of sex shops and shady nightclubs that make all their money scamming and intimidating drunk tourists, and the side streets are lined with massage parlors and hookers on corners and hookers in windows and bars where you can meet even more hookers if you didn't notice all the hookers on the way in. That's Pigalle; you pay attention to where your wallet is and you look over your shoulder a lot when you're here. But tonight a bartender chased me down the street to tell me he'd miscalculated and overcharged me, and gave me the extra five Euros back. It's completely meaningless, of course, but I like to pretend it means I belong here.

Anyway, going out of order here, I took a much-needed break from work this evening to have a drink with my friend Alexis, who is not to be confused with (but most certainly will be confused with) my roommate Alexis. This Alexis is an American woman (married to a French guy) and she pronounces the "s," unlike my roommate who's a French guy (in love with an American guy) with a silent "s." My cell phone contact list, caring not for these verbalized distinctions, is not at all happy about the situation. Do I pay her the insult of listing her as Alexis2? Or the even bigger insult of listing her in my phone by her LiveJournal username?

For several months, the front of our building had been covered with scaffolding and plastic tarps and guys doing all kinds of repair work. This started just after I moved back to France in September. The work has finally finished and the scaffolding was gradually removed over the last few days. I just realized I hadn't really gone out onto our balcony at all since I'd moved in. I was on the phone with my mom yesterday and I wandered idly out onto the balcony for the first time in months, and I was greeted with the sight of the Eiffel Tower, about a mile away. I'd more or less forgotten it was there, and what's more, being on the phone with my mom at the time made me forget I was in France, so the sight of the tower practically gave me an aneurysm. How the hell did I end up in Paris? What's going on here? What a weird life I have.


(Click for bigger version)
We live on the fifth floor. Directly below, you can see my little street, Rue André Antoine. And further out there you can see Place Pigalle and the Boulevard de Clichy running left-right, and we're facing south here, so the Moulin Rouge is a couple blocks off to the right. That's the Folies Pigalle across the street (with the red sign), and the Sexodrome is obscured behind the buildings on the right side there. I love my neighborhood.

Edit: Fifteen minutes after I took this photo, the sky turned gray and it's started hailing! I've never seen hail in Paris before.

Eric and Bridget visited today! (Eric is my old comic book writing/drawing partner, as I mentioned yesterday). It was a wonderful afternoon; I gave them a long tour through Montmartre and Pigalle, and they bought me lunch at one of my favorite cafes near Place des Abbesses. As we wandered up a quiet street around the corner from Van Gogh's apartment, we noticed that someone had hung a handmade cardboard sign on a lamppost that said "Attention au vampire!" — "Beware of the vampire!" Eric took a picture of me standing next to the sign, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be the vampire or a guy looking out for the vampire. They'll send me the pic as soon as they get back to America, and I'll post it so you readers can be the judge. Anyhow, it was incredible to reconnect with these great friends after so many years, and I was very sad to see them go. But it turns out Eric's family here own a bookstore in the Marais, so maybe I should stop by and say hi and tell them I'm the American guy(/vampire) Eric told them about. I'm looking forward to exploring a new bookstore. If only I could read.

Last night Alexis and I hung out a nice, quiet, dark bar in our lovely neighborhood of Pigalle to discuss our rock n' roll band, particularly to try and identify the exact sort of style we want to focus on, after several weeks of playing around with tons of songs by Johnny Cash, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, et cetera, and while I've been writing a lot of weird original songs and listening to way, way too much Hank Williams (if such a thing is possible). I guess we really do look like a couple of freaks, because while we were pushing through the crowd of smokers outside to get into the bar, someone yelled, "Salut les rockers!" at us, haha. We made our way inside and found a tiny table that was out of the way, and we drank a bunch of absinthe and were probably getting a little bit loud as we got excited about all the ideas we were having for what we want to play what we want to sing about (and what we want to wear! okay, maybe that's just me). After a while, a strange woman approached us; she had overheard a bit of our conversation and wanted to meet us. She was a bit older than we are, and she was clearly from the neighborhood and also very drunk, and she just seemed very odd for some reason; she worried me a bit, and I had no idea why. She sat down way too close to me and asked us lots of questions about what we do and how we know each other and stuff like that, and then Alexis asked her what she did for a living. She said (in French) "Give me your hand." Oh fuck, I thought, she's a fucking fortune teller; great, this is going to get weird and probably very uncomfortable. Alexis, ever the gentleman, gave her his hand, palm up like he knew what was coming. She took his hand but turned it and lifted it up, palm facing her, and then she put her hand up against his, the way you would compare size, you know? She said, "Look." He said, "Okay. And?" She said, "Go like this," and she splayed her fingers apart. "Okay." He did the same. She said, "Look. No, like this." She splayed her fingers further. Her pinky finger was way out to the side, much farther than Alexis could stretch. His eyes lit up.

"T'es pianiste!"

"Voila."

Ha! That was cool, but the lady was so weird we eventually had to make our escape. By the time we left we were silly on absinthe and it was getting pretty late, and we ended up in Montmartre at a Brazilian after hours bar that advertises live jazz every night, but when we went inside some crappy band was covering "Sledgehammer." Ugh. We drank a whiskey because we're cowboys, and I taught Alexis the expression "sausage factory." We wandered back to our neighborhood, picked up some eclairs at Mean Bakery (open 24 hours! and not actually called Mean Bakery), devoured them and called it a night. We still do not have a name for our band.

The weirdest thing about being at a gothic dance party in Paris isn't the freaks on stilts or the folks with the plastic tubing in their hair and the lights sewn into their clothes, or the seven-foot-tall drag queens or the kids sporting gasmasks and angel wings, no, the weirdest thing about being at a gothic dance party in Paris is that nobody's fat.

Alexis invited me to go to Tokyo Decadence with him and the guys from the Dead Sexy Inc. last night, right around the corner from our apartment at Le Divan du Monde. I always get a guilty thrill out of being on a guest list; you know, you cut the line and tell the bouncer you're on the list and everyone in the whole overdressed crowd cranes their necks to see who (the fuck you think) you are, and it's kind of fun. I'm sure I'm not the only nobody who secretly feels that way. It was weird to be at a nightclub, which is a scene I've tried to studiously avoid for most of my adult life, but it was totally fine. It's also weird to run into people I know in Paris; I keep accidentally feeling like I'm a total alien and have no business here, and then I realize that in fact I've actually sort of become a part of this neighborhood now. And I guess the freaks tend to notice each other and stick together anywhere in the world; throw them all in the same room and some of them are bound to know each other. A French goth girl heard me shouting to Alexis in English over the club noise and grabbed my sleeve and yelled "Welcome!" at me in mid-booty-shaking.

Anyway, I was a good sport and enjoyed being at the club, and it was definitely refreshing to be out of the house, but I did get bored after about an hour of watching kids on drugs dance in plastic clothes, so I came home around 1:30 and accidentally stayed up all night reading White Line Fever, the autobiography of Lemmy from Motörhead, on loan from Alexis. Did you know Hawkwind's first show in America was at the Tower Theater in Philly? Neither did I. That's where I saw my first concert ever, which happened to be Fishbone in 1991, haha. Some band no one ever heard of called Primus opened for them. I was sixteen, and I went with Ben and a couple girls, one of whom liked me and bought the tickets for us. At the time, it was the greatest night of my life, which seems cute and silly now. It was really strange last night to be sitting half-drunk in bed in Paris at age thirty-two and have that memory come flooding back to me. Thanks for that, Lemmy.

Today I'm going to the movies with Courtney and Agnes, and then hopefully finishing a first draft of some poster art for the Dead Sexy Inc., an illustration of the group as oldschool Tales-from-the-Crypt-style zombies. One doesn't really have to twist my arm to convince me to draw monsters.

It's rainy and warm and completely gray today (which is super goth) and I'm pretty happy (which is not).

My wifi stuff isn't set up at home yet, so I'm spending this cool, rainy afternoon catching up on e-mail in a quiet cafe in Belleville. My favorite Parisian moment so far: walking along the Boulevard de Clichy in the red light district, a block from my place, and seeing a guy running like hell out of one of the strip clubs, with the owner chasing after and yelling at him, and the owner had a big industrial stapler in his hand, and when the guy started to really get away from him, the owner threw the stapler with all his might and hit the guy square in the back (I swear I heard a ka-chunk like a staple went in!), but the guy kept on going, darting in front of traffic until he was gone; cars honking, drivers shouting, pedestrians stopping and staring. The owner gave up chase, picked up the stapler, and turned to walk back inside while all the strippers hung out the front doors to see what was going on. He had this great, sheepish smile on his face as he looked at the strippers and looked down at the stapler in his hand, like, "Ha, I have no idea why I did that."

Anyway, that's my new neighborhood. Living with Alexis and Lada is wonderful so far; last night they fed me pizza for dinner and mangos for dessert, and then took me out for a bottle of "communist wine," as Lada put it — there was a drawing on the label of a bunch of grapes all made out of little raised fists! — at a very authentically French, smoky little bar. Then we went home and watched the Mummy movie with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee from 1959, unil I started to fall asleep on the couch and dragged my ass off to bed.

It turns out there was some hilarious, beautiful confusion about my bedroom before I arrived. I'd hung out at Alexis and Lada's place a million times during my first stint in Paris, and I (mis-)remembered their spare bedroom as having bright pink walls, since apparently their old tenant, Isabelle, had a lot of hot pink furniture and hot pink decorations in her completely white room. So, months ago when I was arranging staying with Alexis and Lada, I asked in one of my e-mails (in my broken French), "Is my room still pink? I loved that color." Alexis and Lada may or may not have been confused by that question, because they took it upon themselves to MAKE the room all pink, since it was just plain white with Isabelle's stuff all gone. So now I've got new pink walls, a pink dresser, a pink boa hanging on my chair, etc. It's AWESOME! I really really love it. It's a perfect bedroom for a nine-year-old princess, or for me. (Same difference.) Well, I suppose it's actually a little more rock n' roll than I'm making it sound; the pink dresser has big leopard print panels, and my bedsheets are leopard print too. Alexis and Lada even gave me a welcome gift; a little pink Dia De Los Muertos skull from a Mexican crafts store that just opened around the corner. It's on my dresser, next to a fucking great photo of me and Alexis from when we were in the Bosnian countryside last summer. I'm going to be very happy in ma chambre rose.

MY VISA HAS BEEN APPROVED!!!

I don't know if I've mentioned this publicly or not, but I've been planning on moving back to France. I went to the French Consulate in Washington DC about two weeks ago to apply for my visa, and I had a bad feeling about my chances, for a couple reasons which aren't very interesting. But everything worked out fine, apparently; I just got the phonecall right after telling a colleague about how worried I was about the whole thing. I'll be moving back to Paris in the second half of September, and living down the street from the Moulin Rouge and the Sexodrome, at the home of Alexis the French rockstar and Lada the Bosnian model. I'm at work now so I can't write much! But there you go. I'm totally freaking out.