Research Ethics and Vermin

Following this weekend’s trend of lethargy, I didn’t actually leave my apartment today. I slept in, felt sluggish and tired, but then eventually put myself together and spent a few hours working on my Internal Review Boards. The IRBs involve a procedure for vetting the ethics of your research if you work on human subjects. This means, of course, pretty much my entire project needs to be scrutinized by a panel of ethicists.

While noble and necessary, the IRBs at U of C suffer from the same problems that similar processes do everywhere. They are tedious and time-consuming; IRB boards are soothed by details, so they demand to know what you will do to mitigate the damage of every possible eventuality, short of perhaps the apocalypse. The format of the application is geared towards medical and psychological studies; most of the questions asked presume that you’re doing to do something invasive to the person’s body or subject them to distressing situations—and yet I can’t simply say, “Come on, I just want people to tell me their stories!” The IRBs presume a private, quiet, controlled environment for conducting your studies; if you’re going to be speaking to people in noisy clubs where courtship and intoxicant-use are taking place, the burden is on you to explain why it might not be a good idea to be enacting the rituals of formalized written consent. What would you do if someone walked up to you in your place of leisure/play and whipped out a contract? How likely would you be to sign a contract from a guy you just met, when the musical community you belong to has a long history of being vilified in the press and victimized by the state?

Anyway, the process is in no way fun, but I finally just sat myself down and forced myself to get it done. Now my advisor (*ahem*) just needs to sign off on the protocols and I will hopefully get a green light for my work.

Another piece of news: I have a mouse in my apartment.

Actually, this isn’t completely news for me. I knew he was there, but we had an understanding. He’s normally quite considerate. He stays away when I’m around, and when he needs to do his business, he climbs into the bathtub and does it right next to the drain. A quick blast of water from the shower head every morning ensures that I don’t accidentally step in mouse poop. I keep my food in my (thankfully large) fridge or in a hanging basket that can’t be reached “on foot,” so I’m sure that he’s not getting into my food. I presume that he’s hanging around because one of my floormates doesn’t keep his/her kitchen clean. It could always be worse: it could be cockroaches.

However, we had something of a gentleman’s agreement: don’t let me see you. I could tolerate the occasional traces of his travels through my apartment, but if I was forced to see him in the flesh, I would feel compelled to do something about it.

Well, tonight he finally made a fatal miscalculation. He scampered out from under the fridge as I was sitting on my couch, only a few feet away. I don’t know what he was thinking; the lights and the TV were on in the apartment. Anyway, he dashed out and, reflexively, I jumped up and chased him back into his hiding place.

In the moment afterwards, I actually felt a sort of sad resignation. I don’t much like to kill things gratuitously, but I was aware that his appearance tonight meant that I would be shopping for mousetraps tomorrow.

Batofar has a canteen?

Something about getting up at 5h00 yesterday really knocked the wind out of me, and I wasn’t even sure that I was going to go out tonight. I spent the majority of the day taking care of some work, looking up my teaching materials for my English class next week, and catching up on blogging. By about 19h00, a Canadian friend of mine called to see if I was interested in going out for and apéro (pre-dinner drinks). In the end, she ate an early dinner, so we turned the date into post-dinner drinks.

We started off at a café near my place called L’Autre Café, where we were seated in the cheap seats (since we weren’t eating). After a couple of “pots” (half-litres) of wine, I got a text message from Fantômette, who was going to be spinning at the “cantine” of Batofar (i.e., the top deck, rather than the club in the hull below). It was close to where my friend lives, so we decided to head out together and check it out.

Up until the last minute, I was still unsure about whether I was really going to go out at all. I was feeling lethargic and I was having trouble mustering the enthusiasm to dance until 6h00 the next day. Nonetheless, I was glad I finally went over to Batofar to see Fantô, as a large part of the “Frenchy Krew” was there was well, so I was able to chat with everyone in a context that was more conducive to conversation than a full-on nightclub.

Mind you, the volume was still set pretty high in that little dancefloor. The “cantine” was the deck level of the boat, including a small covered area, which was maybe 30m2 in total. Although the feel of the space was more bar than club, the drink prices were emphatically club-like (i.e., 10€ for a basic mixed drink). Fieldwork is an expensive enterprise in Paris, I tell you.

Anyway, I got to see Fantô spin for a while, then hung out with the whole group and introduced them to my Canadian friend. By about 2h00, I was feeling tired and kinda done for the evening. There was a Freak’n’Chic party going on at the Rex, but the idea of heading all the way over there and waiting in line just to see a set of DJs I’ve seen several times before just wasn’t very enticing.

My friend and I were going to start heading back home together, but she disappeared as I was making my goodbyes and I couldn’t find her. After making a few attempts to call her, I gave up and headed home on my own. I discovered later that she had made some other friends while waiting for me to leave and so she had gone back into the club and we had somehow missed each other. Ah well, at least she got home safe!

Anyway, I hopped on a Vélib bike and headed home, which was a welcome bit of exercise after a day spent mostly sitting down in front of my computer.

Valley of the Loire...and Pizza Hut

Today, I got up at 5h00. Yes, that’s right. 5am. 5 in the morning.

I was to work as a chaperone for the UofC trip to the Loire valley today. The itinerary was for a day-trip to Blois and Chambord or, to be more precise, to the castles located at both of these towns in the Loire valley. I took my camera, with a freshly-recharged battery, and then totally forgot to take pictures. It’s always a bit stressful when you’re in charge of a group, so I was never really in the mind to whip out my camera and snap pics.

So, no photo evidence of today’s trip. Also, I’m sticking to my policy of not blogging in detail about “work,” so all I’ll say about the trip was that the castles were lovely, but I really don’t enjoy being a chaperone for a tour group.

We got home at about 19h00 and I had plans to go out, but I was just too tired from being on the run for more than 12 hours. So called around and cancelled my plans, and then ordered some pizza. Yes, I ordered pizza delivery in Paris. And just to make it completely ironic, I actually ordered from Pizza Hut.

Actually, the Pizza Hut grub here in France is better than what you would get in the US. They use a blend of French and Swiss cheeses, so the pizza is much more fragrant than the “cheez” mix you usually get on pizzas in the states. The dough was a bit overly wet, and the “stuffed crust” was horribly disappointing, but the toppings were tasty and the whole thing was quite edible. The mozzarella breadsticks, though, were kinda “meh.”

Jeff Koons at Versailles

So I had today off, because I was going to be working as a chaperone for a group of UofC students the next day. I decided, then, to head off to Versailles to finally see the Jeff Koons exhibit there. It’s been pretty controversial, since there are those who believe that putting Jeff Koons’s glossy, hyper-expensive, massive-scale pop-art in the context of Versailles’s pearlescent, extravagant, monumental palace sullies French cultural heritage. I say, “Yes, and?”

Anyway, it’s the kind of exhibit that enraptures or infuriates people, and either way everyone felt compelled to take many, many photos of it. I joined in the fun myself, snapping pictures until my camera ran out of juice. I was pretty salty about forgetting to re-charge the battery; the battery is so long-lasting, I forget that I need to recharge it and every once in a while I find myself out at an event with a useless camera. Grr. Anyway, I’m determined to go back one more time with a fully functioning camera. In the meanwhile, here’s some of the pictures I took today. You can find all of them, with commentary, on my Facebook album [LINK] (yes, I’m on Facebook now; don’t rub it in).

By the way, if you ever want to visit Versailles, go on a weekday during the fall. It was wonderfully under-populated by tourists. Sure, there were still tourists everywhere you looked, but I didn’t have to wait in line to buy tickets or get into the building.

Dissertation Jitters

So, some dissertation-related news: I’ve got a new set of deadlines. The UofC centre has a doctoral seminar running over here, and I volunteered to present a chapter to the group on the 4th of December, which means that I really need to have something ready by the beginning of that month. So, in other words, I have one month to squeeze out a chapter. Let’s see how that goes.

Also, there’s a dissertation-year fellowship (Mellon/ACLS) that has a deadline on November 12, and the application instructions demand a chapter that is neither your introduction nor your conclusion chapter. So, in fact, I’m going to make a mad dash to have at least a reasonable draft of my chapter for November 12…precisely 3 weeks away.

To add to the tension, I went to the first meeting of the seminar today and came to the conclusion that this group is going to HATE my work. There is one anthropologist, who defended her thesis proposal today, and a whole slew of literature (and some philosophy and history) people. Now, back in Chicago I work in a reading group that has a very mixed (and mostly literature) disciplinary demographic and we manage to talk to each other, but this seminar has a very different tone. This woman’s proposal was, like most anthropology proposals, very tentative about defining “common sense” terms like “belief” and “faith” (she’s working on “secular Catholicism” in modern France), since those sorts of concepts are supposed to be derived from the fieldwork (i.e., interviews, observations) that she is about to do. In contrast, archive-based Humanities proposals tend to want all the theory worked out in advance, because this will structure how the project will proceed, what will be excluded, how texts will be interpreted.

In other words, most of the seminar members pounced on the fuzzy definitions and open-ended concepts and wouldn’t let go. Part of this was also due to an ignorance of disciplinary history, though; I’m guessing that most of these other scholars weren’t aware of anthropology’s “Crisis of Representation” in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and the effect it had on anthropologists’ views of their own theory-making. Most scholars in ethnographically-based study are now hyper-aware and self-conscious about how their own terms and concepts risk distorting the results they gain from those they consult with; for example, a North-American notion of secularism might not be the same as the French one, and presuming as much may cause you to misinterpret things and to come to erroneous conclusions.

So, anyway, I’m expecting to show up in December with my soft, weak, vague notions of intimacy, publics, solidarity, affect and so on, and to be savaged. I’m certainly ready for it—one thing UofC teaches you is how to defend your ideas against ruthless critique—but I’m not looking forward to it.

Meh.

Well, not much to report for today, really. I finally finished dealing with that student laptop with the persistent worm. In the end, I backed up her important documents and then wiped the disk and put in a completely new installation of the operating system (Windows XP, not Vista, thank you).

It was raining cats and dogs today, and so I arrived at my English class soaking wet. With all the dignity of a wet cat, I nonetheless pushed through with my class. After that, I headed home, ate a huge plate of leftovers, and did a bit of blogging. Then, sweet, sweet sleep.

Enervé, Enervated

[NOTE: enervé is a “false friend” of the English term, “enervated.” enervé means “frustrated, upset.”]

Although the rest of the day was relatively innocuous, the start of my day was, well, something else.

I left my apartment, a bit behind schedule, and walked over to the nearest Vélib station. All the bikes were taken or broken or, in one case, blocked (i.e., the light on the bike lock was red instead of green). Dammit.

Well, there are other Vélib kiosks around here. I walked over to one of the kiosks on the larger boulevard nearby, and all the bikes were taken or damaged. Fuck.

I walked over to another kiosk a bit further down the boulevard and found that there was one lone bike that was both in good condition and not locked. I put my Navigo pass on the bike lock and it beeped red. What the fuck?

I went over to the terminal at the center of the bike stand and pressed my card to the card-reader. It tells me that I already have a bike out. Fuck.

Something must’ve happened when I returned home from the Rex Saturday night / Sunday morning by Vélib. The rental rate scheme of Vélib was designed to encourage short trips, which means that the rate increases the longer you have the bike out. At more than 24 hours, I can only imagine how much money is currently sitting on my card as a balance. Well, it’s time to make a phone call, as this will only get more expensive the longer I wait. I called the help number marked on the terminal and navigated my way through the phone tree to a live operator. I started walking back toward the Parmentier métro station as I waited for the operator to answer.

Just as I heard the operator come on the line, I hear a loud but hollow thud, scrape and crunch of plastic tumbling and cracking. I thought maybe someone had tipped over their recycling bin as they took it out onto the street. As I turned around, I saw a small car completing its turn to the left, some movement just behind it toward the rear of the car, and a motorcycle helmet, empty, sailing over the top of the car. Holy shit.

As I came around the other side of the car, I saw a dent in the rear drivers-side door panel, a motorbike on its side, and a woman, looking a bit dazed. She seemed, at first, to be ready to get up and brush herself off, as she started to lift herself off the ground and the other driver got out of his car and approached her. But, a second later, her eyes widened, she looked down, clutched her left shin where her black stocking had been torn, and started to scream. Oh no.

She was quickly lost from my view as other witnesses gathered around to tend to her and pull out cell phones. I suddenly remembered that I also had a phone to my ear and there was a feminine voice making confused noises. I ducked around a corner to get away from the woman’s screams and the noise of cars honking as traffic backed up. There were already people helping her, people calling emergency services and at least two dozen witnesses, so my presence wasn’t likely to be needed or helpful; but I still felt bad about walking away and continuing with my business. Regardless of how useless I might be in the situation, I felt some responsibility to just be there and somehow validate, reflect or relay the frightening impact of the moment. I was supposed to stay in the scene, even if I was of no other use.

With all this running through my mind, I tried to articulate my problem with bike rental in French. My veneer of fluency was gone. I spoke in short, telegraphic sentences; fragments that didn’t connect well. I forgot proper technical terms and found myself substituting and misusing more common words instead. I made enough sense for the woman to understand my problem. She seemed to know what to do, as she started to ask me when I had last rented a bike, where I dropped it off, and so on. The details were suddenly jumbled in my head and, as the screams echoing around the corner began to fade, I had to close my eyes and stop walking to get everything straight.

“At which station did you re-attach your bike? What station number?” I didn’t know the number, so I gave her the intersection of streets and the neighborhood. No good, she said, there were too many stations in that area and it would take her forever to find the right one manually. Well, I wasn’t far from the station in question, so I told her I would run over there and check the number myself.

As I ran past the scene of the crash, the woman was sitting up, head down, leaning silently against the driver of the car who had his arms around her while a cluster of people paced nervously with cellphones to their ears.

I got to the bike station, read off the number, and waited for the woman to tell me what to do. She asked me to guess the precise number of the lock I used to re-attach the bike and, after a bit of intense memory work, I gave her a range of 4 or 5 locks. As it turns out, that “blocked” bike I had seen at the beginning of my day was the same bike I had used and returned Sunday morning. I could quite figure out why, but the bike wasn’t properly registered in the system as “returned.” The woman tells me that I there will be a 35€ charge that will eventually be reimbursed from my account, but in the meanwhile I can’t use my card for 48 hours. Well, alright.

This should’ve been the moment where I throw my hands in the air and curse loudly (which I can do with great fluency in French) about how nothing is going right for me today. What I had just witnessed a minute earlier, however, put things into perspective and effectively cut off my mounting frustration. I went to the bike terminal again and bought a temporary 1-day pass, which doesn’t need to use my transit card.

As I biked past the scene of the crash one more time, there was an eerie silence as the rush-hour drivers silenced their honking at the sight of an ambulance. She was being lifted into the vehicle on a stretcher as I crossed the street and dipped into the bike lanes.

Wine cures all ills, except cirrosis of the liver

Well, considering that I had kept myself awake until 6am rather than the much earlier night I had intended, I was a bit of a wreck today. I slept in, then eventually got up and finished washing the last few dishes that were kicking around. I stared at the spotty floor of my kitchen and bathroom and promised myself that I would clean it very, very soon—but not right now.

I treated myself to a few episodes of the Simpsons and Family Guy (thanks to the help WatchSimpsonsOnline and GizzoD!, respectively), scavenged some more leftovers, and set about finishing my blogging of Friday’s events and some of Saturday.

I had a whole bottle of rosé wine in the fridge, which I opened up to drink with dinner. As I watched the news of Colin Powell endorsing Obama repeat over and over on the Anglophone news networks, I drank my way through the entire bottle and fell soundly asleep.

Dishes, Cafés and Clubs

After a very long day and an even longer night (augmented with wine and pisco), I woke up rather late today and felt groggy. I slept in, watched a bit of TV, surfed the net, and then finally took a serious look at the pile of dishes and leftovers in my fridge. I made a dent in the mango salsa and the ceviche, and then got to the work of cleaning dishes and relegating leftovers to various containers. I realized that I had forgotten to put out my “simple” salsa last night, so I had about 1L of salsa that I needed to eat in the coming days. That isn’t so much of a problem, except that bags of tortilla chips here run about 2.50€ per bag. Seriously. I think I’ll just use crackers or maybe potato chips.

Anyway, that was that. I spent most of the evening taking care of these domestic issues and then making a first attempt at blogging last night’s events. Most of my crew from last night was going to meet at Le Léopard Café and then maybe move onto the Rex club to see Mathias Tanzmann. I was feeling a bit too tired to go out clubbing (boy, was I wrong), but at least I could go to the café and catch up with everyone. Also, a friend that I had made in Berlin was possibly going to join us, so I was motivated to go out at least a little bit.

Le Léopard

I hopped on a Vélib bike and made my way down to the Léopard café (this time without getting lost) and grabbed a pint. I was the only one there when I arrived, but after a few minutes the rest of the crew started materializing. We chatted about last night’s debauchery (“That pisco kicked my ass!”) and Fantômette’s sterling set (“She kicked my ass!”) and our sorry state this morning (“Ow, my ass!”).

A couple of pints later, Fantô and her girlfriend asked me if I was following them to the Rex. Feeling a bit sluggish, I said, “Meh, I dunno. I’m kinda tired and I spent so much money on last night’s food, I don’t think I can pay 14€ to in turn buy 10€ drinks.” Immediately, a handful of my friends piped up, offering their place on one of the guestlists or inviting me to be their “plus one.” (In the world of guestlists, you’re usually added as “Luis +1,” which means you’re can bring a companion.) Aww, shucks.

Well, I couldn’t turn down that sort of offer, especially considering that my friend from Berlin still hadn’t caught up with us. I wasn’t sure that she would make it to the Rex, but maybe…

Mathias Tanzmann @ Le Rex

We got to Le Rex pretty early, since our guestlist entries were all going to expire around 1h30. We arrived at 1h00, thinking that we were in good shape, but emerged from the subway station to find a massive, massive guest line. In fact, it was longer than the cash line. We all quietly cursed as we realized that there was a good chance of us being kept in line until the expiration of our guest list spots.

We got in line—me, Fantô, her girlfriend and an Australian couple we were hosting—and grumbled and debated whether we would pay full price to get in. I certainly wouldn’t.

A few minutes later, Fantô saw some people she knew a bit further up in line, so wandered over, said hello, and tried to seamlessly merge into the line. We still had a ways to go to get into the club, but we had probably shaved 15 minutes off of our wait. As we waited, a girl near the front of the line leaned over the stanchion and vomited on the pavement. Good luck getting into the club now, sister. Eww, you had spaghetti for dinner. Ugh, now everything smells like bile.

Then, a miracle. Fantô’s girlfriend pointed out a figure exiting from the doors of the Rex’s offices. It was Molly, one of the two DJs I had hung out with on the Rex’s float at the Techno Parade about a month ago. She’s also the person in charge of bookings at the club, so if there was anyone who could help us out, it would be her.

I called her name and she came over to exchange kisses with me. Thankfully, I didn’t even have to ask her for anything; she immediately said, “How many of you are there? Five? OK, one second.” She said a few words to the bouncer at the front, and the five of us were waved through (walking gingerly around that girl’s vomit). The doorperson (a.k.a. Mr. Peevish Listmaster) seemed to recognize me, shook my hand and asked me how I was doing, and then waved all five of us past the ticket booth without even asking who’s list we were on. This was quite different from the welcome I got the first few times I went to Le Rex back in 2006-07.

As lovely as it was to get ushered past the line, the really nice moment of the night came just a few seconds later. As we passed the ticket booth and started to head down the stairs, I got a call from my Franco-Berliner friend; she had caught up with us, and she was standing in from of the club. The lineup was still huge outside, so she was hoping I might be able to get her in. I walked back up the stairs and saw that the doorman had disappeared somewhere. I approached the bouncer and mustered something that I hoped was a mixture of friendly and respectful French:

“Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you. I have a friend who just arrived as we were going inside and I was wondering if she could come in with us. It’s not a question of guestlists or anything—she’ll pay full price at the booth—but I feel bad leaving her to wait in line while we’re inside.” I was ready to keep on talking, but he simply said, “Where is she?” I pointed her out, and he waved her in without comment. We thanked him profusely and headed in.

I suppose that I partially benefited from having traded kisses with a Rex employee just a few minutes before right in front of him, but the bouncer certainly didn’t have to say yes to me. He could’ve said that she needed to wait in line with everyone else and nobody would’ve faulted him for it.

Anyway, it seemed like the fates were determined for me to have a night out, despite my own fatigue.

The night itself was actually pretty uneventful after that (but not at all unpleasant). The opening DJ was D’Julz, whose selection was sounded more like a DJ set from the mid-90s than anything recent. It sounded too much like the sort of progressive house I was studiously avoiding in 1999.

Mathias Tanzmann came on at around 3h00 and put on a rather mixed set. The first 30 minutes of his set I found really disappointing: thumpy hard-house and noisy trance that made me think I was watching DJ Tiësto or Paul Oakenfold rather than a minimal techno DJ from Berlin. Things took a turn for the better for the next hour, though, as he shifted to a heavy-handed “minimal” techno sound. The set was still, overall, more coarse and noisy than I would’ve liked, but I definitely enjoyed myself.

The last half hour of his set was again pretty disappointing. By then, it was 5h00 and we were ready to head home. We sat down and waited until 5h30 so that my friend could catch the first métro of the morning, and then we headed out and made our separate ways home. I walked a few blocks and grabbed a Vélib bike to make my way home.

Peruvian Food Orgy and Happy People Only

Yow! It’s been several days without a blog post. I’m actually going to just forget about catching up for the majority of this week, since it was pretty unexciting: at work, I struggled with a student’s laptop that was infested with a bunch of worms; in teaching, I had another set of pleasant English classes; at home, I was getting ready to hold my first Peruvian Food Orgy in Paris.

Today was the day for the aforementioned Peruvian foodfest, so most of today’s news are related to that and to the evening of debauchery that followed. This was my first time holding this type of event in France, so the pressure was on to prove to my Frenchy friends that I was as capable in making Peruvian grub as I had said. I’m not working in the same sort of apartment I have back in Chicago (to say the least), so I had to scale back my plans. I made about 10 dishes instead of the usual 20. On the upside, this meant that I had less stuff to worry about during the week. Back in Chicago, I started some of the marinades and salsas on Tuesday or Wednesday in preparation for the Friday meal. Here, I did my shopping on Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening, the salsas and marinades Thursday night, and the majority of the cooking throughout today.

I got up relatively early (considering that I wasn’t working today) and headed over to my neighborhood open-air market to get some last-minute items. I wanted super-fresh fish for the ceviche, so I got it this morning. It was ridiculously expensive, but not entirely surprising for good fresh swordfish (25€ / kg). I got some mangos as well, since the ones I had bought on Tuesday were so overripe that they had become discolored and odd-tasting. I got a bit more herbs and spices as needed, and a few more hot peppers.

As soon as I got home, I got to work on the ceviche, the mango salsa, and “step 2” of my aji de gallina (i.e., pulling the meat from the hen’s carcass and shredding it, draining and reserving the stock). I then took a break to run to the nearest supermarket to get some supplies (including surprisingly expensive paper plates and cups) and then headed back home for the final stretch.

From there on in, it was total cooking madness. I made the rice and the BBQ pork for the fried rice, I made a batch of quinoa, I set up the tables and the serving platters, and then I started finishing the main dishes.

As I started cutting the vegetables for the final sauce of aji de gallina, I heard a knock at the door. One of my friends had volunteered to come a bit early and help me prepare, so I let her in and put her to work immediately. I made her stick the anticuchos on the skewers as I finished cutting the vegetables for the aji. A second friend showed up, opened a bottle of wine, and we started to finish the aji de gallina. By the time I had finished the whole thing, blended and thickened the sauce to a paste, and then added back the shredded chicken, my apartment was about half-full. I had invited about 18 people to my place, and my small studio was handling it surprisingly well.

As the last wave of people arrived, I worked on the fried rice (which stuck too much to the bottom of the pan) and eventually got everything onto the table. Once I had had a moment to eat some of my food and explain the dishes to the various guests, I headed back into the kitchen and deep-fried the yucca (a.k.a. cassava, manioc) and handed it around the party. Finally! Done cooking. Now, dishes.

The original plan for the party was that I did all the cooking and my guests brought drinks. Not only did my friends all bring drinks, they decided to bring a full bottle of wine per person, rather than per group/couple. This meant that we had about 17 bottles of wine to go through. So, by the time I had finished cooking and started drinking, we were all a bit tipsy.

And then two of my friends brought pisco (Peruvian, not Chilean!) and the fixings to make pisco sour. Yay! They made a huge batch, using the whole bottle, and started handing out cups of it to the whole party. I don’t think they realized that pisco is a bit stronger than whiskey, so when they gave out large cups full of the stuff, they were essentially distributing two drinks in one. About 20 minutes later, everyone was pretty drunk. In the midst of it all, one of my friends decided to start doing my dishes, which was both hilarious and much appreciated.

By about midnight, it was time for us to start moving. Tonight was also the last night for Fantômette’s “Happy People Only” series and we all needed to be there before 1h30. Realizing how hard it would be to move such a large group of people, we started getting ready to leave right away. The story of us getting to La Scène Bastille is a bit hazy in my memory, but I recall it being pretty hilarious.

Happy People Only closing party @ La Scène Bastille

We got to La Scène Bastille at about 1h15 and made our way into the club. After dropping off my stuff at the coat check, I headed in, bought a drink, and made the rounds to greet any friends that I hadn’t seen at my dinner party. There was a pair of guys spinning called AidAke (a.k.a. the Luberjaks), but they were just finishing their set as I arrived, so I can’t say much about their set.

1h30-3h00: Fantômette

Fantô really rose to the occasion with a fantastic set (after all, it was the last installment of a series that she had been organizing for a couple of years). The importance of tonight’s event prompted me to compare her performance to her work at some of the earliest Happy People Only occasions, and so much has changed. Her mixing technique is now flawless to the point of being “invisible” and effortless. She manages to align tracks in such a way that major changes in texture occur simultaneously in both tracks being mixed; in other words, she extends the “rule of multiples of 4” from the tracks themselves to the mix between them. Her selection of tracks is solid—not just in the aesthetic sense of choosing good minimal-house tracks, but also in the narrative sense of sequencing tracks in a way that avoids clashes of texture and style.

The crowd, many of whom know Fantômette personally or have come to know her as the resident of this recurring night, showed their appreciation as well. People cheered and pumped their fists every time she brought the bass back, and the applause at the end of her set was long and strong. As a friend of mine said tonight: she’s a “pro” now. There’s no doubt that she is well beyond the realm of “local amateur” or anything like that.

3h00-4h30: Siskid

I don’t think I’ve seen Siskid perform before, but I’ve heard good things about him. His set was very good, although he preferred pounding, aggressive techno rather than finely wrought minimal. I still definitely enjoyed his set for the intensity and overall impact, but it felt a bit coarse. I’m still a pop-and-click-minimal boy at heart, so I’m never 100% excited when I hear these full-throated “minimal” sets. It’s sort of like the equivalent of the “big-room techno” genre within the domain of “minimal” music.

At some point during his set, a female friend of mine started fooling around with a male acquaintance that I had just met that night. He would feel her up and try to kiss her, and she would sometimes oblige, and sometimes push him away playfully. After a while, another friend of mine—male and very much queer—came over to them and started talking to the couple. He was very good friends with the girl, but he spoke intensely with the guy for a few minutes.

I don’t know who made the proposition, but suddenly the two boys started making out. My female friend looked over at the two of them, then turned to the rest of us with an expression that said, “These boys are insane,” and kept on dancing. When they started kissing again, I leaned over to her and made a joke, along the lines of, “Watch out! If they start slipping tongue, it’s over.” She replied, “Apparently, the point of this is to make me jealous.” We shrugged and continued dancing and exchanging amused glances. Eventually, the necking finished and my gay friend, rather drunk, moved on to acting ridiculous with another set of friends. In short order, the “straight” guy went back to caressing and kissing my female friend.

I thought that this was a really fascinating convergence of trust, desire, humor and sensuality. As my own experiences with French guys [LINK] confirms, there can often be a lot of flexibility around sexuality and sensuality within the frame of “a night out,” especially when it’s been enabled / enhanced by intoxicants. There’s a certain practice of “coming undone” that makes these sorts of scenes non-dramatic and non-shattering. There was no drama about the boyfriend turning gay or the friend flirting with his friend’s object of desire (although maybe there was some tension below the surface) but rather a shock-absorbent layer of laughter and absurdity. It’s just a party, after all…

4h30-6h00: Newborn

This is the same duo that spun at the last Happy People Only as Nathan H and his friend, GuiGui. They managed to spin a set that was technically quite solid, although I wasn’t always thrilled about their track selection. They tended to lean more towards classic “electro” styles and even progressive-house sounds, which didn’t really excite me. Nonetheless, some of the tracks they selected were great, and the overall feel of the set was quite engaging.

I wasn’t able to catch the whole set, though, as I started feeling tired around 5h30 and decided to head home. I had been up since relatively early, slaving over a hot stove, so I was feeling pretty exhausted. I made my rounds of saying goodbye, then left with a Frenchy friend of mine (from my Berlin Summer), and eventually found a Vélib station and biked home.