Funk Babblings

I've gotten really behind on podcasts since Thanksgiving, so in the last couple days I've been working on catching up. I'm still two weeks behind though.

One of my favorite podcasts is Julien Smith's In Over Your Head, out of Montreal. It's ostensibly a music podcast, exposing me to types of music that I normally wouldn't listen to (hip-hop, electronica, maybe some some sort of ambient Euro-pop, and other stuff I can't quite define). But the thing that really keeps me listening is his rants and stream-of-consciousness talk between the music.

One thing he's talked about is a vegan restaurant in Montreal that apparently takes pretentiousness to a new extreme. (You may think Dragonfly Neo-V is pretentious, but I think this one has it beat.)

You feel like you're under a benevolent dictatorship.... It tries you to persuade you to lead a different life while you're there....

I've never been told 'No' so many times in one hour by a waiter.... 'No, We don't serve coffee.' No espresso either. How about tea? 'We have chai.' OK, can I have soy milk for that, I mean I know you're a vegan restaurant, thus soy milk, but.... 'No.' Coconut milk? 'No.' Almond milk? 'No' Rice milk? 'No.' 'We don't have any kind of dairy product nor any dairy product substitute to thicken up coffee, even if we did have coffee, which we don't.' Chai will be fine. And this is about the time when your ego sort of lets go and decides it wants to fly out of the building, so of course mine does. This is the sort of environment in which you'd find yourself if your country were suddenly taken over, and you found yourself under the rulership of some sort of tyrant.... Of course they only serve one meal per day... and you say can I have it without, say, chutney, and if there's chutney in the meal, their answer is, inevitably -- yeah, you guessed it -- NO.

.... And it's kind of crazy because if you don't finish your soup, you're kicked out. And if order dessert, and you don't finish it -- which has soy yogurt, by the way, so what's the deal with them not having any sort of milk, this doesn't really make sense to me, of course the whole thing doesn't make sense at all -- if you order the dessert and if you don't finish it, literally THEY BAN YOU FOR LIFE.

.... It's like having an omnipresent kind of angry god looking over your shoulder at all times. This is really what it's like. I'll send you the address. Go ahead, I dare you to go.

The 5-minute rant starts 5 minutes into episode 93. (At around 29 minutes he mentions that there's another vegan restaurant in Montreal that's sort of the feel-good-hippie version.)