ob[seen]

wow. a whole week to catch up on. lucky my life is dull, or i'd be waaaay behind right now. :)

the "enno and chris foodfest" on sunday was great. we had a blast, and made more than enough food for probably like eight or ten people or something. too bad there was only four of us. but yeah, it was very cool. we made canonballs and hollowed them out, and we made the chili to go in them, along which cornbread, and a "vegetable rice dish" that i hesitate to call "spanish rice" since it wasn't quite the same, but we tried, and hell, it tasted good anyway.

with mucho props to janessa for providing the recipe skeleton, i also succeeded in making the pumpkin pie! of course, being the clumsy oaf that i am, i forgot the pastry blender (read: super-duper-pie-crust-making-accelerator-tool; sometimes called "wire knuckles" because of they way it looks), and had to do the two knives thing. [rolls eyes] wow. it works, but it takes a loooong ass time. but enno has this really cool mill thingy that turns wheat into flour, so we made the crust with freshly ground whole wheat flour. yum...

and the recipe was a double crust, so i had an extra that i wasn't sure what to do with, and we decided to make a quiche out of it for an appetizer. also very tasty. the whole ordeal was just pretty amazing. i mean, i've always loved cooking, but there's something about not only being able to share a fun experience with someone else, but at the same time know that the person is just as fanatical about it as you are, and also enjoying themselves thoroughly, rather than simply humoring you. probably i'm not making any sense, but sometimes it just strikes me, and i think of what an awesome feeling it is just to have friends; especially good friends. it's just... well, the way things _should_ be, you know? it feels nice.

aline and her sister (the girls enno had invited to join us for dinner) were nice, and provided the impetus to switch to french (for whatever reason, if it's just us, enno doesn't usually want to speak french with me). i held my own, and didn't have to use english at all, but i wasn't 'dominating the conversation,' either.

usually, i try to be pretty good about separating the week from the weekends, which i obviously did, given my description of sunday, but unfortunately that often leaves me feeling behind come monday morning. this week was no exception. everything did get done, and mostly on time even, but it was pretty cramped at points.

alcherio had me give about 1/3 of the lecture on wednesday. i didn't really want to, but having done it, i guess it wasn't so bad, and he said i did a pretty good job, so that's encouraging, at least. the lab for yesterday morning did finally come together as well (i wrote it from scratch). it took longer than i thought for most of them to finish, and what i thought was the hardest question turned out to be fairly trivial compared to one i thought would be easy, but overall, it went as smoothly as could reasonably have been hoped.

monday, i got free tickets in the mail (this time from T-L, the company that runs the public transit in lausanne) for one of the modern dance productions going on. they were for thursday; we'll get to that in a minute.

tuesday, enno wanted to give it another go, so we did indian. i made a massoor dahl, but had to use ordinary lentils instead of red ones, since that's what he had around. it still came out well, even if there was way too much of it... and he made palak paneer. the really fun part was that we made the paneer (cheese) ourselves! (well, rather, "himself" would probably be more accurate, but i watched, and could probably reproduce the procedure; you can bet i plan to try, at least.) enno is back home in holland this weekend, so he couldn't come to the thing on thursday.

but markus said he would come, and so pushed 'movie night' back to wednesday. i can't remember what the planned film was, but someone turned on "strange days" for a few minutes, and we ended up seeing the whole thing. it was definitely "strange," as the title promised. i guess it's another one of those films with a reasonably large cult following; i had never heard of it, though.

somewhere in here, early in the week, i decided to try reading in the metro to and from work. i hadn't done it before, because i remember when i was little, and tried to read in a moving car, and it always gave me really terrible headaches. the metro seems to be alright, though (either that, or i grew out of whatever it was), so i've been reading the copy "angels and demons" that jim lent me. it's another book by dan brown (the da vinci guy), and while it's also written in the 'cheap thrill' style that i've always assumed would epitomize the 'romance novel' genre (and therefore i feel kinda literary sell-out for stooping to the level of reading it), he is pretty good at inventing puzzles, and i've _always_ been a sucker for puzzles. the 'myst' style computer games are basically my runaway favorite. anyway, i'm almost through it now; probably i'll finish tomorrow.

thursday, we went to the dance thing. it was in a little blackbox theatre in the middle of a clean, but still industrial district. reminded me of the original knightsbridge in old pasadena, only a little bit bigger. just seeing the stage and the lights made me want to be involved in a production again. not necessarily even acting; there's just something intoxicating about the theatre process that i really enjoy. anyway, culture is cool, and free tickets to culture that i ordinarily wouldn't go to is even better, but i think this was bordering on a little too much culture for me... [grin] it was waaaay out there kind of weird.

so the thing was written by a [famous?] choreographer named phillipe saire, and it was called "ob[seen]." i guess it won some really special international award thingy as best original choreography or something in 2003. as far as i can tell (and after cheating a little bit by reading some of the newspaper reviews) it is supposed to question where we draw the line between things that are socially acceptable and things that aren't, and why. it was cool, and i enjoyed it, but it was teetering on the edge of what i would call 'art.' (i'm sure if you know me at all, we've probably had this whole discussion before, so i won't rehash it completely here.) my impression was basically that it took more balls that talent (freudian pun? [you'll understand in a minute]).

the first half was almost completely silent, which was different in and of itself. there were six people, 4 men and 2 women, and small subsets of the group (one to three at a time) would perform little sketches on the large low table in the center of the blackbox stage. one of the first ones was a man removing a woman's bra and underwear out from underneath her clothes. for another, a man laid naked on the table, and one of the others dragged a large knife around the outside edge of the table, making a scraping noise. a couple involved one of them "sculpting" one of the others into various positions and expressions. in one such segment, the "statue" kept trying to get away, and the sculpter kept forcing them back---very strange, but suprisingly powerful, as a visual. one of the most amusing (and also strange) clips was a man and a woman walking up to the edge of the table, her topless and him bottomless, and then sinking down from standing until his 'naughty bits' and her breasts were resting on the top of the table. then, towards the end of the half, it got really wierd. one of the men climbed up on to the table in his birthday suit, did a couple of muscle poses, and then bent over and turned around to reveal that he was wearing a pig mask over his ass and proceded to walk around backwards on four 'legs' like this, as if he was the pig. and one of the very last ones, a guy stood on the table (clothed) with his back to us, and did nothing for a while, then adjusted the waistband of his pants so that he was partially mooning us, then a little later moved it down farther, and eventually took his pants clean off. after standing that way for a while, he hung a sign off his back reading "fuck me," and bent over to grab his ankles. at about thirty second intervals (or maybe even longer) he would shift his position to be gradually more obseen/provocative, until he was eventually on his knees sticking his ass out. it was more than a little disturbing. even moreso when he started talking (the first and only spoken words in the show) and attempting to convince someone in the audience to actually come up and do it. "there's not one big swiss man here who'd like to stick his cock up my arse?" etc... wow. talk about 'alternate universe' experiences... very strange...

then the second half was more like the dancing that i had expected, but even that was a little odd. the only way i can really think to describe it is "artistic falling." seriously, they would lose their balance, fall on the floor, and then bounce back up. or sometimes they would fall into each other, and throw each other apart, and then fall together again. sort of like the whole "trust-fall" thing, but intricately choreographed. it lacked the 'visually amazing' factor of, say, a gymnastic floor exercise, but it was impressive nonetheless. and the music was very loud; a stark contrast to the first half.

that night, they were also doing something special, which i had never heard of being done before; they had three artists in the audience, doing drawings/paintings during the performance, and then after it was over, they put their work up on the stage for the audience to come up and look at. this i thought was really amazing. the woman with paints did four whole paintings during the 90 minute performance. then there was one of them who did about 20 or so line sketches with a red grease pencil. just simple lines, but unbelievable in their ability to convey a massive amount of imagery in a minimum amount of strokes. the last lady was using blue, white, and black chalk on corrigated paper, and any one of her ~12 pieces would be welcome on my walls. i was shocked by how good they were. particularly considering their rapid production.

so, yeah, the whole thing was kinda bizzarre, and more than a little surreal, but i enjoyed it. i guess it's like peeking into a slice of life that is definitely outside my experience. it's fun to check up on "the other side" once in a while...