Eventful Evenings

„A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.“ Franz Kafka

This week I had a lot of guests. Since getting my apartment I have not had any friends stay for the night. This is mostly because everyone lives very close to each other in Lille. Anyway this Wednesday I had one of my classmates from last year come over for a party. The party was called Nuit à 3 because it was a party of 3 engineering schools in Lille. The name can be somewhat misleading though.

The party itself was pretty average, but we had a lot of fun. There were two stages – one was for commercial music the other was for techno. Needless to stay we were mostly listening to techno. After a solid three hours we decided that we would prefer to head home and mix some music ourselves for a little while before signing off. We went home and DJ'd from 3 to 4 A.M. The volume was kept low enough to not disturb neighbours.

This same friend of mine got me heavily listening to Daft Punk this week. It is very much a fascinating listening experience. The duo very clearly laid the foundation of all electronic music to come. They are not only true pioneers of the genre but they managed to make their experimental style reach the mainstream media. For example in Giorgio by Moroder they put together the sound of the future (the synthesizer), jazz sounds and classical music. Absolutely incredible guys.

About music: this Saturday when shopping in a thrift shop a certain song came on that surprised me. Just as context this happened on April 2nd and it had just snowed the day before. Anyway the song played was Last Christmas. In April. That is very special. Also in that same store I heard a pretty terrible French version of the House of The Rising Sun.

The reason I ended up in that thrift shop was my second visitor of the week. This person I have known since the age of two. She studies in Paris and I went to visit her in fall. I even wrote about that visit in Midnight in Paris. Other than thrifting we also went to the Beaux Arts to look at a few paintings. That was a very nice experience because I truly enjoy going to museums. Furthermore I had not gone to a single museum since Paris so it was about time. We also went to the zoo of Lille and I got to see meerkats so that was a great success as well.

On Saturday evening we went to check on the colours of Lille. We decided to go on rue Masséna, the street with the most bars in Lille known for its loudness. We sat down pretty randomly at L'imprévu. Our discussion led from movies to Sartre and how taking oneself seriously can be a problem. We came to no conclusion at all but we had a very thorough analysis of the garçon de café and compared ourselves to him. That is precisely what I find entertaining, developing on a subject while trying to understand it ourselves. Bouncing ideas off one another is great in this case because it grants a change of point of view.

This Week's Suggestions:

🎬 Operation Y and Shurik's Other Adventures:

This movie was a big part of my childhood. I have seen it countless times thanks to my dad.

📷How I memorised an entire chapter from "Moby Dick"

I very much enjoyed the idea of a mental palace, this is a memory technique I will definitely try to practise sometime in the near future.

Thanks for being here! See You next week!