I started the week a long way from Lyon. I was in good company, though. I was at an event with 900 portable storage aficionados at their annual conference and exhibition at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. This is what it says on the can and is about the size of a small city on the banks of the Potomac, nominally outside Washington, DC. Our fellow guests were Volunteers of America and The Light of the World. I fondly remembered the Jefferson Airplane sang, “All the people I meet, got a revolution, we are volunteers of America.” Only after standing in front of the sign listing the various NGOs and charities that make up Volunteers of America did it finally dawn on me that it was indeed more than just a lyric. The Light of the World is an evangelical church who held two days of their Church of Living God services in adjacent exhibition halls, one in Spanish and one in English. All the 3000–4000 attendees hailed from Central America and arrived as if dressed for a wedding, or church. Every man and boy wore a suit and every woman a long dress, and most women’s heads were covered with shawls. As I moved from one session to another at the exhibition I was attending, the constant background noise was loud, plaintive exhortations in English and Spanish to do some more praying, honoring or celebrating celestial deities. In our conference, we were honoring and celebrating much more mundane things, including the keynote speaker Brett Baier, the host of Fox News’ ‘Special Report’. He tried to reassure us that he is from the News side of the house of Fox, not the crazy Opinion side, but he undermined his credibility slightly when he still managed to slip in the company lines about the crime wave and immigration being the greatest challenges the current administration is failing to address. However, from the comments and questions from the audience, he was playing to his people generally, and they agree with him. Whether that is because they have studied the data and made that conclusion themselves or that Fox News has been telling them that this is the case, relentlessly, every day since Grampa Biden was elected, I am not 100% sure, but I know where the smart money would be betting.
We ate in a variety of restaurants along the waterfront at National Harbor, in principle a complete new town built over the last 16 years with hotels and a large MGM casino. As you can imagine, what it lacks in taste or good design, it makes up for in sheer volume of places to eat bad food and shop for expensive branded goods imported from China. As we arrived, we were informed that there was a three-day emergency ‘Juvenile Curfew’ for the weekend from 6pm to 6am. I mistakenly thought this was some overzealous local overreach to prevent the Pro-Palestine protests upsetting the conventioneers; it was however an effort to prevent local teenagers from less affluent communities doing rampaging, shoplifting raids and upsetting the rich shoppers. So as we walked to the restaurants, we had enough police presence to protect a United Nations meeting.
The compensation for putting up with four days of corporate food and terrible wine was three days in Brooklyn with my daughter, her partner and a hair-shedding device hidden in a very sweet dog called Tallulah. For those who have not visited Brooklyn, it is a large part of eastern New York City, characterized by large Reddy-brown brick (brownstone) houses with wide tree-lined sidewalks. It is populated by the young and affluent, who like the more open spaces, larger apartments and, in a symbiotic response to their presence, its many places to eat, drink and be merry. It has Metro connections to Manhattan and other boroughs. Urban and large, it has a population of 2.7 million people spread over an area of 180 square kilometers. By contrast, Lyon has 1.4 million over 1,140 km2. It is less grubby, low-rise and graffitied than the neighboring Queens, less Bonfire of the Vanities than Soho and the lower end of Manhattan. We went to a comedy night at a Japanese restaurant/club/sake shop, ‘The Rule of Thirds’, which in itself is quintessentially Brooklyn, and all of the acts took the piss out of the locals as being rich, privileged and overtly hipster. The comedy was great, and I laughed at all the jokes, including stuff that I was told I probably should have not, but that comes from being the oldest member of the audience by 30 years. The stand-out act was a Norwegian guy, Daniel Simonsen, who you should check out. The agreed targets were the locals, group autism and the tech industry.
If I am in the US, I take advantage of the good food that is as easy to find in any major city as it is difficult to find in France, i.e. Mexican or Asian food. This trip was no exception, with Japanese steak and deconstructed nettle pesto at Rule of Thirds, Cantonese updated Salt and Pepper Chicken at Pot Luck Club, and Oaxacan breakfast gorditas from For All Things Good, being just some of the treats to tickle my pickle. As I struggle with American wine I drank some great beer, including a Young Master Hong Kong Pale Ale, and a Kagua Blanc White Ale from Belgium. My beef with Californian wine, in particular, is that for the most part it is caught in the climate trap of growing grapes that have flourished in the Old World and are more suited for the much cooler climate there. The basic result is too much sugar, which results in too much alcohol. The other thing that annoys the crap out of me is that having higher alcohol is not an excuse to charge more, in fact they should charge less, but that’s not the way the US wine industry works. At one of the dinners I did for work, someone chose probably the worst possible wine to have at a fish restaurant, an Orin Swift red blend, Abstract. It tasted like an abstraction of a Mexican coke, but one with 15.4% ABV.
Talking about abstraction, I was treated to tickets to a gig to see an abstract jazz-rock experimental artist called L’Rain. I had originally planned to see Julia Jacklin, but despite pre-sale notification and much discussion, someone forgot to get tickets for the night before I flew home. As a Hail Mary the previous day, that same person DM’ed her Insta account and asked Julia for tickets. We were just leaving the Pot Luck Club, which is just around the corner from Bowery Ballroom, when said person decided to post something on her Insta. Imagine her and our surprise when it transpired at 5.00 pm earlier that evening that Julia had replied to her to say, “Sorry it’s late notice but if you still want the tix let me know”. It was now 30 minutes after Julia’s show started, and we were in the Bowery and not in Brooklyn, where Ms. Jacklin was playing. So, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, we went off to see L’Rain.
She had a merch desk selling stuff and one was a cool T-shirt saying: “I Can’t Stand L’Rain”, cute and very Ann Peebles. I have listened to a lot of noise rock and jazz fusion, from Mogwai, Metheny, Mandy, Indiana or Matmos, so arguably I have a high tolerance for atonal rhythms. After the fifth meandering shitfest of self-indulgence, where the three of us ended up standing with our fingers in our ears praying for the ‘song’ to end, I suggested it was time to go. I really wanted to buy one of those T-shirts as I really cannot stand L’Rain.
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 