Uniqlo doesn’t nap when it comes to innovative digital marketing. Their savory-sweet UNIQLOCK invented a new form of commercial art by combining performance, catalog, and clock into a screensaver. Schoolgirls in cashmere dance, make cat’s-cradles, and execute solo secret handshakes with their bodies, each in a bite-sized four-count before the time flashes and another video loads. You can literally while away the hours watching it.

Their latest, UT LOOP!, is a excellent interactive effort. It is a rhythm composer using video samples of various hip young kids making little noises, sometimes words – “dum”, “ti,” “pi”, “uo”, “okasan”, you get the picture. It clean, lovely and fun. The interface design is a typically understated, white-red-black affair, and keeps the focus on the figures in action. There’s plenty of ajax and flash about, and though I would suggest some changes to the “edit” mode, overall its quite usable. Bonus points for the embeddable player.

This little toy/marketing tool is so great because it is in and of the internet. In, because it is necessarilly a web object: it requires interactivity, viral networks, and participation to succeed. Of, because it is an obvious nod to Lasse Gjertsen, a first-wave webvideo star whose edited-webcam beatboxing will be familiar to most YouTube natives. Another happy feedback loop between creatives, commerce, and the crowd.

This weekend, Julien introduced me to an interesting Nordic take on minimal techno called Skweee. It is, essentially, a happy, retro-synth loving genre that goes in for funk- and soul-powered rhythms and melodies. From what the Internets tell me, its blowing up in Sweden in Finland, grace á the label Flogsta Danshall and its producer-founder Pavan – you can checkout an interview with him over at DJMag.com.

The first track I heard was “Muni” by the Stockholm artist, Beem. It immediately reminded me of some of the late-90s output of the Swedish leftfield-IDM label, Dot: they share the same effusive, borderline-cheesy take on stutter-funk. It is, to be sure, very white on its face, but once each track is built up there is an undeniable, downtempo groove that begs a little livingroom shuffle.

Not all skweee is so friendly, however. Spend a little time with the player at Nation of Skwee, or watch some live shows on the YouTube, and you’ll that some veers towards piercingly-acid noise, some to broken-beat hip-hop pretense, and some that is simply uninspired, high-treble noodling. This is to be expected in any young subgenre, especially when one hallmark of electronic music overall is isolated, bedroom amateurs, but I’ll give the project the benefit of the doubt.

“Minimal”, as she is spoke today in France, has in my experience become such an overwhelmingly hard, funless region of unending arpeggios and unreformed fours-on-the-floor, that the goofy risk taking of a few Norseman comes as a welcome change. Flogsta Danshallis bringing a stable down to SONAR in May, and I will be curious what effect that southern exposure has on skweee’s prospects for the rest of the year.

You can download Beem’s album at his website. Enjoy!

Paris with Kids: Noël Redux

The holiday season is a great time to visit Paris with children. Sure, the weather may not be ideal, but there are far fewer tourists to tangle with, and the pre-Christmas vibe cheers against the cold. Streets and storefronts are draped with decor. Gift markets crop up in public squares across town. Crepe stands serve piping vin chaud. A huge sapin – tastefully hung with white lights and red globes – glows happily beneath Notre Dame.

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Amidst all of this, one of the best places to take the kids is right in front of the Hôtel de Ville, where a sort of winter carnival takes place well into January. A huge fake igloo is set up for public programs, while the middle of pl de Greves is given over to an open-air ice rink and an icy sled run. Carrousels flank either side of the square. The lines can get long, but thankfully vendors are on hand with candy apples and barbe-a-papa to keep the little ones happy while they wait their turn. For people-watching it’s best to come at night, when young and old, local and tourist take to the ice beneath floodlights, and the sled run gets bathed in arctic blues.

Another great option for parents is the Grands Magasins, the fabled Printemps and Galeries Lafayette department stores. Don’t worry, though – all the fun stuff is on the outside, so you won’t get roped into buying any unscheduled xmas gifts. Both of these stores feature psychedelic light installations across their entire façades, which illuminate bd Haussmann from rue de Mogador to rue du Havre. At street level, the shop windows boast fantastic, automated marionette scenes – think dancing teacups and pirouetting teddy bears – for toddlers to marvel at. The stores are nice enough to set up viewing platforms for the little ones, and the whole thing doesn’t cost a euro-cent.

Any self-styled 10th-grade feminist, hell, any moderately self-aware 10-year-old girl, should be able to point to 90% of the images of women in media and advertising, to MTV, and to the pink aisle at Toys’R'Us and say, “This is keeping us down.” Sadly, I don’t know how many 10th-grade feminists or self-aware 10-year-old girls the West is producing these days. Besides, self-awareness and feminism don’t usually occupy the same curriculum. Just check your local Smith alumna for a sense of humor.

One thing that I find absolutely reassuring is that this, my vehicle, the Internet, is no longer merely a repository of underage smut and a haven for stained-sweatpants pedophiles. It is, as the younger generation discovers its wily charms, a platform of social-reinforcing pedagogy, wherein MySpace.com is not only a mire of sexual predators, but also a day camp for producing over-sexed, under-achieving girls who cherish the planned obsolence of 15-minute celebrities with the same alternating veneration-vilification once simply reserved for, say, last seasons clothes. Mana from heaven! Another tool to stunt the minds of the fairer sex!

Case in point. One of my nieces has recently discovered the joys of email cc: and fwd:. Now, I’m patient, or at least I pretend to be, so I won’t chide her for it and just send the chain letters and whatnot straight to trash. Sometimes, however, I’ll take a peek at the packets of information that pass through and have, in a sense, made her brain (and, sigh, all of ours) yet another node in the artificial unintelligence of Der Web (I wonder what language and/or generic accent indicated “sinister” before the Germans got a bad rap? Probably Roman Latin. Maybe Bush’s faux-Texan will replace it for my generation?). Here is one jewel that she sent me. I censured her, not for sending it to me, but for sending it to anyone, for promulgating such an insidious ideology. To wit:

flip flops bellytops

lemonade in da shade

blue skies hot guys late

nites wata fight ice

cream sweet dreams

party time lookin fine

sleepin in sneakin out

that’s what Girls are all

about

This, of course, needs no explanation. I just want to point out that, even though TV is a 24-hour bootcamp for Whoredom, girls are sending each other shit like this. “Oh,” you would say, “that’s just girls having fun.” To which I would respond, “Kitsch 80s pop references are not a response to criticism.” I’m a childless 27-year-old American male. I look at porn, guiltlessly and often enough. But I find this kind of thing appalling. If the messages “our” girls are getting from the top down aren’t bad enough, now they have to contend with this sort of e-enabled mutual reinforcement.

So apparently I have woken myself up with a rant. That’s fun. What precipitated all this? The “flip flops, belly tops” has been itching at me for a while, but it was really something else, a very stupid, easy conceit which I will lay out right now:

Yesterday I was flipping through the one women’s magazine in our bathroom. (Mathilde, bless her, does have the excuse of needing to keep up on such press for her PR job, and I have not know such mags to be a vice of hers.) Reading it, I couldn’t help but think Holy Shit! There is a massive conspiracy to make girls stupid! Then it occurred to me, if that was the case, what a hypocritical bunch of bastards we, The West, are, to criticize cultures where women are still subordinated. For God’s sake, they just do away will all the nonsense and keep them locked in doors or appropriately covered when out. Does that just mean that the culture industry, having subsumed identity, warred against society, and marginalized the family, is now waging a campaign of gender oppression in lieu of that good-old-fashioned-barefoot-and-pregnant-(and-niqab) we thought was gone? Oh, wait, we all already know that? There is no end in sight.

I was going to say, “This is why I want boys.” But then I remembered Stuff magazine, and why I didn’t go to a state school.

But dinner. From the first time I sat at table with Mathilde’s family, I noticed they had a very methodical approach to the special-occasion family or social meal. Now, I’m sure this procedure is not particularly unique in France, quite the opposite, I would imagine, amongst the petite bourgeoisie, but I was first introduced to it by the Perrottes and thus thank them for it.

Unless they come from a particularly foodie family, or one lately immigrated from, say, Italy, most Americans are unacquainted with the sort of end-to-end pleasure of a properly conducted repast, one whose purpose is not to feed, but to nourish with pleasure and company. Thanksgiving hardly counts – the menu is too staid, the day singular and fraught with the stresses of family…stresses, it seems to me, exacerbated by American mobility and by the general atrophy of the American family. Suffice to say that it is the rare and lucky clan that comes to its own table together more than twice a year, without the pretense of a holiday. (I stress its own because, in the States, I think we are more liable to take a non-holiday celebration out to a restaurant.) The Perrottes are one of these families.

Now, dinner with Mimi this time was, as it has been but once before, a smaller affair with she, Mathilde et moi. The ritual remains the same though, and I will outline its stages below:

1. Aperitif – Either champagne or negronis, though Mimi (and as well, Mathilde’s parents) often chooses whiskey. Knowing my fondness for whiskey above all liquors, and my peculiar sensitivity to the bubbly (ça me fait mal à la tête), Mimi always stashes a bottle of Paddy’s under the coffee table, which she gleefully produces as the preferred alternative. The aperitif is consumed over warming conversation and a variety of snacks – typically something crispy and something savory, and at Mimi’s always including some amazing piquante olives – while the main dish is being finished. In this instance, a massive cut of Limousin beef – raised on a Norman butcher’s family farm and brought back by Mimi that very day – which had five minutes in the oven before being transferred to a searing pan full of rock salt. I turned it once before the ice in my drink had melted, and by the time my glass was empty the kitchen aroma announced that it was ready.

2. Food & Wine – Obeying the call “Á table!”, we move from the salon to the dining room, where the meal itself is plated. This evening, the aforementioned viande, sliced thick, the rosy hips of each cut oozing with juice beneath a smear of roquefort blended with butter. On the side, a leek tarte and some exceptionally crispy roasted potatoes with garlic. I asked Mimi how to give spuds such an excellent texture, and she answered, simply, “Put them in the oven, and forget them.” Accompanying the meal were two bottles of red – a 1990 Bordeaux and a 1997 Burgundy, if I recall correctly. Every adult Perrotte maintains a respectable cave, and thus I have quickly realized the value of cellaring wine. I may not be able to distinguish a $100 bottle from a quality $15 bottle, but I can tell the difference between a good wine and a bad wine, and can safely say that now I understand how a good one definitely becomes better with age. By the end of the main course, belly bursting with and head high on red-meat, I was ready for a smoke. But the repas was not yet 2/3 over, and it would have been rude to leave the table. One must forge ahead.

3. Cheese and salad – In the States, both of these items are usually offered in advance of the meal, but not so here (nor, I believe, in Italy). A tray of three to five cheese – here, a chevre, a roquefort and a semi-hard whose name escapes me – goes around the table, followed by a bowl of salad. I’m sure that somewhere there are gastronomic treatises extolling the digestive virtues of appending, and not beginning, a meal with dairy and greens, but I can only speculate on the logic and affirm that it is rather nice to bridge the meal and the dessert with crunchy and creamy textures.

4. Dessert – Here, a home-made tarte aux pommes, unctuous with God knows how much butter. After a childhood gorged on candy I have rather lost my sweettooth, but I cannot deny that, in a procession of savors, it is best to end on a sugary note.

5. Coffee – By this point the wine is exhausted, or at least abandoned, and the juice of the bitter bean is required to guard against the lethargy of consumption. The arc of pleasure being almost complete, this stimulant helps buoy its latter half.

6. Digestif – Now a small glass, or two, of some regional firewater. As coffee rouses, so the digestif emboldens – calming the belly to its proper functions, and fortifying the mind to take on the remainder of the night, if there is any. In this case we had Mirabelle, a clear liquor from Lorraine, made from tiny yellow plums. Two shots from a silver thimble, some more conversation, and the arc is complete.

After saying our goodbyes, Mathilde and I cabbed it home and slept blissfully. I beleive I could get used to this “everyday civilization”.

When I first arrived in Paris, I couldn’t get over the lack of conveniences I had grown accustomed to in New York. The bodegas – or, as they aptly (if inappropriately) call them here, les arabes du coin – were not half as abundant, nor did they stay open all night as is customary in the city that never sleeps. What’s more, these alimentations generale charged exorbitant markups compared to their stateside counterparts, and to the typical French grocery. Buck-twenny-five Coors tallboys? Hardly. Try 2 euro (or $2.60) pint cans of Kro. The situation was even more dire for late-night, post-bar bites. Sure, you could grab a vile panini or a soggy crepe around Pigalle or les Grands Boulevards at 2am, but you could hardly get a made-to-order grilled sandwich at the corner store at 3am, or mozz sticks and jalapeno poppers delivered at 4.

Having just returned from NYC after a month of unrelenting “catching up” (read: socially-sanctioned dissipation) with my friends there, I have a renewed love for Big Apple delis, but have achieved an inner emotional detente over the relative conveniences offered by different cultures and different cities. Obvious though it may seem, there are distinct species of instant gratification native to every Western society, despite the march of globalization and the leveling of expectation. A textbook case would have to be the Netherlands, where you can of course pickup tree to your hearts content…but which, if you are a good and circumspect tourist, you will not smoke curbside in front of God and toe-headed Dutch children.

As is often the case, the stark contrast between what you can and can’t do, or have, and where, orbits around vice, and came into greatest relief when I first arrived back in NY with the lifestyle expectations I had grown accustomed to after half a year in Paris. Suddenly, I couldn’t drink in the street, buy booze beyond beer in corner stores, or smoke, well, inside. I suppose it is not so much a question of whether I would trade those doites for all-night grills and fryers – I’d take them all, natch – but rather a very telling expression of culture.

In spite of all civics class propaganda, it is apparent that the French approach daily life with a deeper sense of la liberté than we Yanks do. Sure, Californians can buy a fifth of rotgut at Safeway, but woe betide you light a fag within the state’s borders. And forget about New England buckle-shoed blue laws. We may have different tolerances to vice from state to state, but – with the exception of Louisiana, I’m guessing (parce que c’est Nouveau France, peut etre?) – even states that have cause célèbre liberal laws will also have some hypocritical, draconian policies to even the keel (I’m talking to you, Nevada).

But who knows? Social liberalism is a double edged sword, cutting individual freedoms as soon as as the political climate surrounding an issue shifts to privilege, or ostensibly “protect”, society. Sartre said, “Hell is other people”, which I think goes a long way to explain how the French covet their, let’s not say individual, but personal rights to pleasure. A ban on smoking in indoor public spaces is coming down the pipe, however, and it will be interesting to see how much it is flaunted or enforced here. Liberté or fraternité - which will prevail?

Welcome to my blog.

I was born today, October 8th, in 1979.

I am writing this to know myself better.