Category: Me Myself&I

In full action 

Dear Santa,I’ve been good. Unfortunately my partner and I have been separated by some obscure stupid things. So dear Santa I’d like you to get her to me as soon as possible. Thanks. Harold

I’m waiting

She’s coming

Dude Claus,

Thanks Santa. Have a seat, have a glass of milk and then you will come and taste my foot in your mouth for being so late. I don’t care that Christmas is December 25th, you should have give me my fantastic gift way earlier! I’m waiting for it for ages now! And all you can do is have this lousy face full of hair. Seriously dude. Hopefully I’ll see her this week but don’t you ever do that again to me you giant dwarf. Actually next time I’ll be with her so don’t bother moving your lazy ass, you can stay home getting drunk. Harold

I didn’t know how hard it would be to just switch and go back and forth on two different western culture and cities.

This is in picture, what is happening to me:

Or in a more detailed version:

It makes me laugh but at some point since I’m back, I look like this. Everyday.

Anyway, I put my finger on what is making me crazy: there’s too much dynamic in Paris. Dynamic in the sense of the difference between things, like in music between the softest sound and the loudest. From top to bottom, moving all the time. Mildness doesn’t exist.

The good part is this amazing social diversity. Rich, less rich, young, old, every kind of body shape, every single color or ethnicity of the world interacting with each others in a little city, packed in the public transport is something I always love to look at in Paris. One time I remember these women, a 1meter 85 (6”1) black woman chatting with this 1m40 (4”9) blonde white one in the train like they are at a pajama party. “Interracial” couples are so common it’s not even a feature. Also adopted children with white parents are quite common. It’s hard to witness that level of social mix in LA. You can easily see it here.

So that is a great result of chaos and diversity in Paris. Everything else makes me want to throw things.

It starts with the sunlight going from bright enough I can’t see my monitor screen to darkness where I need to put the lights on. In 20 minutes. Same with temperature. Outside cold then metro a little warmer then cold in the street then this fucking hot door at the BHV, then super hot in the store and everything back. Whatever you wear at some point you need adjustment because you’re going to feel uncomfortable with a 20°c delta up and down in one hour.

It’s the same with people. From the children yelling and jumping to the elderly going downstairs in the metro creating a big traffic jam because they are slow as hell. From the old white lady who stinks perfume so hard to the black dude smelling like he didn’t take a shower since august, I feel like I’m always fighting some sort of annoyance.

As for services, it can be awfully harsh but sometimes, people are just perfectly doing their job and being nice. You can expect everything from the worse to the good with an emphasis on the worse though. Yeah, it’s boring not to know.

I feel like french people are thinking this way: “I don’t give a shit about what’s going on around me because I have the right to do and exist as I am”. Well yeah technically it’s ok but society-wise, it means chaos. And it is chaos. Just look at any damn sidewalk in Paris, how people behave. Amazingly random and chaotic. Oh, maybe it’s because of dog shit.

No wonder why french can’t agree overall. There’s always a voice, someone to fuck everything up. You know, like this stupid group of drunk people screaming like pigs in the streets and making bars to have serious problems with the police.

Social chaos creates status quo and stagnation which are totally unproductive, as France politics during the last 30 years can demonstrate that. Of course great people, great minds and great things are born from this amazing source of creation but they love to get the hell out of Paris whenever they can. Plus they usually get success outside of this town.

I loved LA for this overall stability. Stability of weather, people behaviors, what you can expect from a service etc It’s so much less stress in the everyday life that you can comfortably focus on your work, especially creative ones. That king of micro stress you don’t even know from where it comes and which makes you want to punch people in the throat after years of having to deal with it like these awful RER strikes, each year. Well I don’t want it anymore.

Interestingly enough if I look at my dad’s generation –50s- virtually no one got out of France. My cousin in its 40s, a little more like a couple of his friends. Me? I can already count a dozen of them going from Germany, Spain, China, Morroco, US/UK, Swiss, Australia, Japan.. We are going to be very different from our parents and older generations, we are going to be the french who moved around the world instead of staying in our little village, pissing and shitting on each other’s back while smiling like it’s no big deal.

So if we ever get back to our country, it’s going to change. In a good way, I hope.

Great.

A week that I’m back in Paris after three months in LA. Going from couple/sun/music/english to alone/rain/nomusic/french is an experience I heavily do not recommend. It’s pretty much driving me nuts to the point where I need to grind my teeths way too often while looping a song 120 times in a day. Yesterday was Patience from Aurra.

*scream*

I feel like comparing and seeing the good and bad of everything between two different lifestyles and of course I’d go for a mix of them at least just to make me feel that there’s room for progress and stuff to do I guess.

It’s exciting. But I have to cool down on difficulties. It’s like everytime I have the choice I choose the hard way. Going around the hill or going through it? I’m taking the steep route. Falling in love? I choose the one 10 000kms away. Computer games industry? I choose the most obscure field, game audio.

When it’s going well it’s so rewarding. the main problem is that it’s exhausting man! But the paradigm for next year is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good (Sorry France, Larry David reference).

Also I’m recovering 200 gigs of data from my dying NAS. I think I’ll never go after 500G+ hard drives because it’s too much to keep up with. It’s like when we pass the billion scale (Gb, Ghz, $B) we can’t really follow or enjoy it. So when it goes around one thousand billion.. Even for 90 bucks I don’t want to (1To drives, 10*12 omg).

Ok I’m bored.

PS: Bluuurgh is also a metal band name. “So what are you listening to?”

Under the freeway, LA 2009

USA, CA land of the car lifestyle. You quickly understand that you need one to move around. What struck me:

– Toyota Prius

Third generation

The car is the most fuel efficient car ever produced and has a better reliability that some expensive german cars. Add the built-in technology (the last generation includes a voice-activated touch-screen DVD-based navigation system and an 8-speaker JBL audio system) and you can easily see why this car –at least in LA- is like the R5 in France in the 80s. It’s fucking everywhere.

– Where are the US cars?

*cue More Bounce To The Ounce*

Short answer: nowhere. In the pick-up category, there’s still some. For every other brand new car or old ones, it’s like 90% of them are japanese. Maybe more. Sure some people are still cruising with good old vintage Cadillac Eldorado or of course some ‘68 Ford Mustang but it’s a very narrow percentage.

I don’t know why but seeing this I can’t help but think about Hiroshima. If Germany had bombed France with one of the deadliest weapon ever created, I don’t think we would ever love their car to the point that our national production would be almost dead. US/Japan relation is weird. And yes, we don’t care anymore.

– Traffic lights

*cue drinking in LA"*

I guess it’s a classic one but damn, it makes so much more sense to have it in front of you instead of on your side like in Europe. Because you don’t have to look away from the road and because it’s on the other side of the intersection, you always have time to use the breaks without little panic.

– Driving

Night Life

For my first time driving one hour alone on the freeway and all I was scared as shit. But it’s easy. I mean with a gps it’s easy. Everything is large so you rarely have to do some weird and dangerous stuff to get out from a wrong way. Road signs are not confusing and never too late. People drive safely, I mean I come from France and on a traffic jam people are just bitches. Here I was the bitch, sneaking from lane to lane. I didn’t see a lot of asshole behavior. Around Paris on the Boulevard Périphérique it’s simply war. With a lot of trucks and 2 wheels. In LA there’s almost none of them. It simplifies a lot what to pay attention to. Also people know how to park, I’ve never seen someone doing two or three times the entire process of doing correctly a parallel parking move. It has to do with the wide roads and the car culture.

– Law

”So.. How about sandwiches for diner tonight?”

Man it’s tough. A friend got a 450$ ticket for not stopping long enough at a stop sign. I had a 80$ parking ticket on a saturday morning at 8:03am. Another friend had a 300$ ticket for crossing the street while the pedestrian sign was saying he could not. They don’t mess around. In France every driver would be in jail with laws like that. At least it makes people careful and on the road that’s the priority I guess.

– Parking

 
Ha! Wait.. 

Night-mare. Worse than anything I did in Europe. Frustrating because from my narrow french point of view everything is wide large and fat here so parking spaces should be that way too. Oh boy.

– Relation with the car

Time to nap

I saw so many people hanging in their car. Like this time when I went to the music store, this guy was almost laying down in it, chatting on his phone in this dead and dusty parking. One hour later he was taking a nap. I saw a lot of that, people parked and chatting, having diner etc. In France only workmen are doing that for lunch or students to smoke some pot or make out in winter but otherwise the car is alone, left in the street like an object. Seriously.

– Thoughts

With everybody in cars one thing really cool is that sidewalks are empty. It’s great to walk with no one interfering your path. It never happens in Paris.

LA should have something like Velib and an extended public transport system. The city is lucky enough to provide the best weather ever to bike all year long. If it was easier to move from a side to another one (tons of buses, but for the metro..) cars would be less useful unless you have to carry a bass amp or something. Nobody likes to be stuck in traffic. Everyone hates parking hunting. Public transportation allows you to safely tweet, read, dance and not care about these things. I mean how great is that? How can you be against that?

Next comparative subject, probably services.

I’m stressed out. Some big decisions to make, important things not coming on time and a little low on money (though it’s always good to see that 100$ is “only” 67€). California sun is smoothing everything but still.

I feel the biggest point of this stress is the difference between real life and the virtual one. Hell sometimes I complained that it takes a couple of minutes to share to the world a picture while finishing a track or finishing a game takes days, months, years. Moving very important digital stuff takes a second and is free, moving very important furniture takes ages and costs a kidney.

The differential is huge. Internet makes me go anywhere I want in the world without a visa for as long as my computer is on. In real life it’s so not the case even if at some point of civilization, we eventually will be as free to move as we are on the web.

But it’s slow and hard. Or Internet is too fast and too easy, I don’t know.

Anyway, I have to go back in France at the end of the month. Needless to say it’s a fucking pain in my ass. Needless to say, I don’t like it.

Bye Eggs Benedict and Granola..

It’s temporary of course. Also I don’t blog a lot because I’m playing like crazy. More in the next post.

• Widescreen

Open wide

“According to manufacturer NEC: "The vision of humans naturally moves horizontally rather than vertically, and ergonomics experts have recommended a broad format for a long time. In a professional setting, the use of large screens better facilitates execution of the tasks on the screen and thus contributes to increased productivity."

Couldn’t say it better. From the first 16:10 laptops to big wide screens for desk or TV, this aspect ratio is just a drug for me. I had a good CRT 4:3 19” monitor but I felt constricted. Doing sound and having a timeline in all my apps made me want to have a landscape setting and much more room which means much less scrolling. I can now stare at my 24” widescreen 12hours a day when with a 4:3 I could not (also the LCD technology is easier for the eyes). So it’s better for work, it’s better for movies, it’s better for games and everything. It took so long. Now you can buy a good 24” widescreen for less than 200 bucks.

• SSD

 
A mechanical fragile piece of hardware on the left, static realm on the right.

The Solid State Drive. Once again it’s a lot for work purpose that I bought one two years ago and I was blown away. The HDD has three major issues: it makes noise, it heats and the more the disk is full, the more performance is going down. I had a Fujitsu 15K SCSI HDD and it was ok but the SSD just kills it in every way.

You launch a window, it’s instantaneous. You install/uninstall an app, it’s fast as hell. You launch Photoshop in 4 seconds etc It doesn’t heat at all, it’s totally noiseless and even full at 99%, performance are exactly like if the SSD was empty. So for your system –because to stock music and medias hard drives are way cheaper and efficient- I highly recommend them. I guess with a 64bits OS, a lot of RAM and one of the last SSD available, you’re not gonna wait often in front of your computer.

• TNN

A vacuum cleaner on the left, a monolith on the right.

This is the biggest change I have encounter in all my computer life. You launch YouTube in HD, or any media player made with Flash and fans are kicking, blowing. You launch an app, fans are blowing. You launch a heavy javascript website, fans are blowing. It’s just a terrible experience but we are so used to it we don’t pay attention to it.

Until you experience a total free noise use of a computer.

Everything I do on it doesn’t make any noise at all. No low fan blowing, no water pump, not even an electrical buzz or something, just no-thing. Scary as hell at first, so used to monitor computers with sounds. I have no longer this survival aural need, I don’t have to mentally kill the noise and my ears, my focus are enjoying that so hard. The only thing is that it adds heat to the room, in a good way though (passive convection). In LA it’s not very useful but in a colder environment, this hidden heater function is pretty great.

Main problem is very few people had the opportunity to experience that but when you do, without compromise on performance ( I have a desktop dual core, and I can go quad core) you just can’t go back. When I hear the G5 of my girlfriend screaming, or my laptop vacuuming it annoys me a lot because I know the effect of noise on the brain: fatigue, irritation. IT people know that very well.

I wish I could invest into or create a company around totally noiseless computer tech. Seriously it’s just teh awesome.

• Netbook

And I wash my hands as much as possible.. We need washable keyboards.

I use and used it everywhere. Equipped with a ssd, it’s just the most reliable piece of tech I’ve ever owned. I poured a big glass of sake on it while using it, screen and sound stopped. The alcohol was dripping out of the RJ45 port. Made it dry under the sun a whole day and Windows restarted perfectly. It would be dead if I had a mechanical hard drive. I made it fall a couple of times, still here.

I like to type on it because my hands are more curved and my wrists love it. The only problem is that for the one I have, the screen is not very good (no LED backlit). Also it’s hard to switch keyboards size (from netbook to laptop to full keyboard). But like the last phones pocket computers, this piece of hardware allowing me to get the hell out of a desk without compromising my computer addiction, has changed my lifestyle. I’m currently editing this blog post laying down in bed.

I love when technology is affordable and makes the life easier.

There is definitely a difference.

This is pretty much the diet of CA people for what I saw. I’m almost kidding.

After a couple of months living in LA, here is what strikes me about food.

• Calories

Over nine thousand!!!!!!

It seems like everybody is counting that. Calories. I know what it means from a scientific point of view but when actually eating, knowing how much I need per day, knowing where the calories are.. They are in my belly and I don’t give a shit about these numbers (when I do care a lot for them everywhere else!). I subconsciously know that a waffle is heavy, I don’t need to know how much. People can have conversation on how much thousand calories they are aiming through diets, it’s like Klingon to me. Having the chance to have parents cooking everyday for every meal, doing it myself since forever, it seems like it helps to know what my body needs. My mind is bypassed. Then if I go to a restaurant, I just enjoy, knowing that next days have to be light on food. I feel quite alone on this behavior. Here the Now is strong. Enjoy the Now. And then regret it watching your body getting fat. Whatever. Maple syrup, sodas, peanut butter are almost banned from my diet anyway.

• Vegan

I don’t know what it is, but there’s no meat in it.

My first trip in the US showed me how much vegan food is developed here. From store to restaurants, there’s vegan food almost everywhere in LA. I like it, it’s just that I feel I need to eat more often and being used to the classic three meals per day, sometimes it bothers me to eat four or five times a day. The good thing is when I get back to meat it’s sort of a fiesta for my taste buds. It’s great to have this choice though. And healthier of course (I mean compared to 3.99$ meals with two big macs, fries and a taco) and overall better for the earth.

• Quantity

For one

In restaurants, all meals are heavy. Like, ridiculously heavy. I almost never finished one. Good thing that the doggy bag exists but now I know that if it doesn’t in France, it’s because we don’t need it. Here it’s just an obligation. I always feel bad not finishing my plate so I’m happy to get the leftover home. Still, it’s really too big for me and dare I say, for anybody. I’m not the only one not finishing what I order.

• Waste

Wasteland

There is a lot compared to what I know in France and it’s of course related to quantities of food. As food is pretty cheap, people don’t feel the need to save it as much as we do in Europe I guess. At first it was shocking for me. I try not to focus on it. Sort of America Waste Of Life.

• Bacon

Flickr comment: “My two favorite things in the world.. … ….. with BACON!”

Bacon is a religion here. You just have to watch Jim Gaffigan stand up about bacon to understand what it means to the US culture. It’s everywhere, I even ate some chocolate tablet with bacon. Of course it’s pretty bad for the health to eat that everyday. In a sandwich one time I had four slices of it. Four, between a salad leave and massive bread around. This day I realized I could not eat that more than once a month. If I can escape it.

Other than that, eating in the US is not really different than it is in France. Sure, having a cheese store nearby selling Pont L’évèque and Vouvray helps a lot :)

The other day I just tweet-censured myself:

“Maybe I shouldn’t have add "Black/Afro-American Male" in some form this morning. "Other" would’ve been better http://okcupid.com/z/2v”

Saw these stats/facts from SexActu. So annoying to see what I felt. So annoying to censured myself in the real-time blogging realm. Just because I don’t want to be seen as the angry/whiny black man. Because it’s another bad thing society-wise you know.

But yeah, nothing new actually. That is maybe the worse part.

To White people who could be offended by such statistics, I would just say to you something I’ve learned from Dave Chappelle here:

Calm down motherfuckers, you win by default.

I have one problem with music: lyrics. I can’t really listen to them. Sometimes I cam hum every single instrument of the song, know every note triggered and yet being totally unable to sing some simple english I have listen to a gazillion time.

“That’s weiird”

Though I always found that french was not a really good language to sing with, even young and listening to french stuff I could not pay attention or care about it. Learning song lyrics by heart was annoying for me.

Music first. I automatically focus on music you know, the background noise that make lyrics shine. So much difference between being before, not understanding at all what is going on to now, where i can dissect almost any complex piece of music and give you the name of that synth or see the waveform in my head. Mmmh ADSR..

Problem is lyrics from songs are a big part of pop culture. I could not sing anything, except what I did search and learn patiently making myself, karaoke-wise, a pure disaster.

I do learn some from time to time, well after digging the music of course.

“Hey wait, what is he/she saying? Let me see from what I feel with the music”

Now that I did that for a couple of years, I think what I like the most in lyrics is canevas of ideas, not stories. I’d rather have some EW&F:

“Celebrate, change your thoughts to love
Celebrate, what you’re thinking of
Time ain’t long, soon we’ll be moving on,
Moving on…”

than some DJ Quik:

“This is for the ho in you
In you, the ho in you
This is for the ho in you
In you, the ho in you”

Ok it’s a bit extreme but I took this example because in both case I appreciate the music. But I can’t sing something as shitty as a fake sexy-porn story. Sorry, I’d rather do it for real.

I think it’s not just coming from the fact that I do music. I was not at 5/6 –well barely starting- and I can’t say that I hate words, I always loved to read.

Sorry mermaid, it.does.not.work

I think it has to do with mind independence.

Having someone telling me a story 10 000 times, with the same tone, the same manner, the same words is not something I search for. Actually this is something that my brain fight against because it knows how speech is powerful. Reading is my own voice. I can interpret, do what I want.

I know it’s a bit of paranoia and autism that I experience. It’s underneath, I can’t control that. It’s like if I can’t make the audio speech mine, if I can’t relate deeply, it just goes from one ear to the other.

Or the opposite: with sad lyrics it’s really easy to feel the same. I can’t sing I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo. Hell no. I know I am a weirdo, no need to accentuate that by singing it hundreds of time! You just have to search “creep” to find the Radiohead song, first result. Scary.

I would not say that lyrics make people do stuffs. It’s just that they’re part of the culture and if a song can change the world in a good way, hundreds of them storytelling gangbang with whores for entire generations of men, cannot not have an impact. The impact is the glue that makes them so slow to move on but this is not the subject. Gladys Knight is right.

I listen to the singing melody, not the lyrics. I listen to it musically –voice grain, rhythm, flow-. This is what I love with some hip-hop songs, I don’t give a shit about what the dude says –bragging stories, nostalgia blabla- but the voice is so greatly part of the sound that I can loop it over and over. Now that’s a musician behavior.

Anyway, this all thing is socially impairing to me. But surfing this ocean of sounds is so good.