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In This Issue

• Positively Sino-Soidal
• AIDS, SARS, Avian Flu... Bean Curd?
• A Paradoxical Paroxysm of Pancakes
• Letters to the Editor
• International Yuks
• Après Moi, Le Corbusier
• Get a Free Bobblehead, for a Limited Time Only!
• The Sweet, Sensual Twang of Success
• Shut Up, Shut Up.
• To Sachs With Love
• Santa's Grottos Steal X-Mas
• Broad Goes Abroad to Paris
• A Lesson on Father Christmas
• Hugo Chavez in 2008: He’ll Crush Us Like Grapes!
• Martha’s Civil Unrest Tips
• Politics: Opiate of the Asses
• A Plan to Unite Humanity Without Using Glue
• Mad Cow: All the Cool Kids Are Contracting It
• Things Around the World on Which to Pee
• Trapped in the Closet (Deleted Scene)
• Mario Around the World!
• THEY WATCH
• The Staff of 21.4

Michael Bredin

This article is about Columbia University in Paris. Before we go any further, let's think about those two things and how well they go together. Columbia University: tastelessly large campus. Wealthy American children. Bad food. Dirty. America. Now, let's try Paris: tastefully small spaces. Angry French socialists. Good food. Clean. France. Do you see the similarities? Well Columbia did, and that's why they decided to extend one of their ever-growing tentacles into the heart of European culture. Excited to experience a strange new land, I tripped gaily over that tentacle and across the Atlantic to Columbia University in the City of New York's weird, but totally hot, French sister, Reid Hall.

Upon arriving at Reid Hall, I walked through an unassuming door to find a delightful courtyard full of roses. Bright, airy classrooms encircled this courtyard, and tiny staircases and enchanting balconies made for some beautiful architecture. I marveled at how French it was...that is, until I saw the students.

With one exception, I didn't know anyone else in the program of over a hundred students, taken mostly from Columbia, and mostly from my year. This leads me to believe that Columbia cloned these people in their secret laboratory for the evil purpose of being really annoying. Perhaps they are trying to drive the French out so they can build a new school of social work where the Eiffel Tower once was.

In any case, the girls, half JAP, half WASP, greatly outnumbered the boys, always a perfect recipe for annoying. They talked mostly of hair, bras, and inane celebrity gossip. My suspicions were increased when I casually asked one particular specimen how she liked it at Harvard. "Your hair is so dark..." she said. Unsure if she had heard me, I asked again how she found the intellectual life at the top college in the country. "Um, yeah we've got a pool...but whatEVER! The Espirit here, like, totally sucks!" she exclaimed, and then disappeared in a cloud of black ink.

It only took a matter of minutes after my arrival at Reid Hall to realize I needed a native Parisian friend. Someone that would hang out with me and show me the real Paris. Someone with a worldly sense of cultural knowledge. Someone intelligent, intellectually stimulating. Someone who would challenge me in ways America never could. Bottom line, someone sexually attractive, preferably male. It's true what they say about French people...they're all really fucking hot. Unfortunately, most of the guys my age have hot French girlfriends, with whom they are so deeply in love they must dry-hump them constantly, especially when in public. Nevertheless, I hit the only place where I know how to find sex, a rock club, to try and get me some of that.

It may have been the novelty of hearing the same indie-punk-electro soundtrack that I am used hearing in New York, while surrounded by American guys with black hair and tight pants, played in France, while surrounded by French guys with black OR blonde hair and tight OR uber-tight pants (the diversity in this final respect was quite riveting), but I liked this rock club. Getting to the dance floor, it was just as I expected: lots of gourmet French cock (and some poontang too) cuttin’ a rug and just begging to be sampled by my foreign palate. In France, they've rightly rejected air-conditioners as an unnecessary bourgeois appliance, so everyone was deliciously sweaty. To which I say: the better to show off their pale, skinny, uber-hot, uber-French forms. I felt I'd died and gone to punk-chick heaven!

As they bounced around gaily to tunes such at "Fascisme" and "Rockaway Beach," I got right in on the action. I was rewarded with some smooches from a particularly fetching young man who might have been a member of the aristocracy were it not for his tattoos. His pants were certainly tight enough. My French was pretty bad, but we communicated all right. I pretended to understand what he was saying, too distracted by his sun-king-like beauty to concentrate. When we exited the club, I stood expectantly, hoping for some sort of lurid invitation to doings the likes of which would make the Marquis de Sade blush.

"I go home now. My parents, zey do not like when I come in so late. My father, c'est un cochon. Goodnight, ma cherie!"

There you have another thing about French guys...they’re all a bunch of freeloading mama’s boys. How was I supposed to do bad things to a fully grown French guy with his parents watching TV or making croissants or eating frog’s legs in the next room?? Ok, ok, so he was only 18...it’s not my fault the French get hot so fast. Perhaps I should start a European chapter of NAMBLA for women. I did end up seeing him a couple more times, where he showed me the few remaining “non-touristique” things to do in Paris, such as climbing on people’s roofs and turning out all the street lights, thus undoing the evil Hausmannization of the 19th Century and reclaiming Paris for the Proletariat, i.e. adorable blonde kids who live with their parents.

My summer continued with other random escapades, none of them involving students at Reid Hall, and all of them too many in number and too scandalous to recant here in this article. In conclusion, the best thing about being enrolled for a summer at Columbia in Paris was Paris and the worst thing was Columbia. For those whose parents insist that you “learn” while “spending all their money,” the Reid Hall route may be necessary, as opposed to just frolicking around at your own free will. Just don’t let some Reid Hall institution distract you from all the cock, tits, and anarchy to be found outside of the pearly black gates, wherever in the world those gates may be. Have fun, and vive la revolution!