I was clearly still emotionally worked up all day today. Don’t get me wrong; I was in good spirits and energized (despite sleeping only 4 hours) and happy and all that. But every time I saw video or read text that was even slightly sentimental about Obama’s win—especially stories of people just coming completely undone at the news—it overwhelmed me with emotion in ways that I hadn’t felt since I was taking steroids back in April for my Bell’s Palsy.
I didn’t cry or choke up. Instead, my heart leaped into my throat; I had that vertiginous feeling of falling and rising mixed together. It was sort of the kind of feeling that rushes over your body before you start crying. Rather than being “moved to tears,” I was just being moved—suddenly, overwhelmingly, frequently. All of it was exhausting and a bit distressing, but also somehow very, very pleasurable.
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
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EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
OK, I presume that I’m not “giving away the ending” by celebrating Obama’s win right here at the top of this post. If this is news to you at this point, you probably aren’t reading anything on the internet, anyway.
Anyway, my daytime activities were surprisingly busy, but of little consequence for our story today. The only thing worth noting is that I was a nervous, twitchy, anxious mess the whole day long. It didn’t help that I skipped lunch and drank coffee non-stop, which made things even worse.
After finishing my English class around 19h00, I headed home and got ready to head back out again. Breakfast in America was staying open for the election results, so I thought it would be good to meet up with friends for dinner there, then move on to another, more massive party for the election results. While I was near home, I went to a Monoprix and picked up a bottle of champagne. I suspected that I would probably find champagne wherever I went tonight, but I felt like I needed a “backup” champagne bottle. In the case that the election is announced while I’m standing on a street somewhere, I was gonna crack that shit open and guzzle it in the street, possibly pouring it over myself and dancing in the puddle.
My main goal for the evening was to find myself in a big crowd of people, preferably ex-pat left-leaning Americans or some other group that would be likely to go into hysterics if/when Obama won. I desperately wanted to be part of the hyperventilating crowd that later appeared in Grant Park in Chicago, and so finding a similar mob of affect here in Paris was my consolation.
There was going to be an official Democrats Abroad / Republicans Abroad election party, but it was a gala event that would cost a lot of money. Thankfully, the Paris chapter of the Americans Abroad for Obama were also having a party at the Palais M. conference hall / club at Porte Maillot. It promised to charge only a 5€ cover, and it was supposed to involve mostly young American ex-pats.
When I finally got to Breakfast in America, champagne in hand, there was a line all the way down the block, filled unsurprisingly by Frenchy people. I took a look inside the small restaurant and saw that every table was taken, and nobody was hurrying up to leave their table. We were likely to spend the whole night there, waiting for a nonexistent table.
I got in line and then called two of my friends that were supposed to be meeting me there. In the 15 minutes it took to catch up with me there, the lineup had moved about 1 metre. We took stock of our situation, decided that we were too hungry (and grumpy) and headed over to The Moose, instead. The Moose, as you might recall from my blog posts from last year, is a Canadian bar that serves Unibroue beers and poutine. Can’t ask for more. We made our way over there, waited about 10 minutes for a table, and then finally ordered up some delicious, delicious poutine. Mmmm.
The Moose, however, is primarily a sports bar, so they didn’t have CNN playing on any of the screens. When we asked the bar staff, they told us that they would change the channel around midnight. It was barely 23h00, we had already eaten, and the bar staff had pointedly taken away our dishes and put the bill on the table. We decided to head to my place for a while, to watch the first results as they rolled in. I was still going to go to Porte Maillot for the party there, but since that party wasn’t going to start until midnight, we decided to hang out at my place. If I had known then how crowded and chaotic it would be over there, I would’ve gone there right away.
Anyway, on the way over to my place, one of my friends got a call from two of his friends, whom he invited to join us at my place. My fears that this was going to turn from pit-stop to house-party intensified as we swung by a late-night shop to buy beer and wine. When we got to my place, my friends and the other two guests settled in and looked like they weren’t going anywhere soon. I wasn’t planning on having guests that night, so my place was a mess; I spent the next hour or so puttering around the apartment, cleaning up around my guests as they watched the election coverage.
Of the two friends-of-friends that had been invited along, one was very nice and the other was insufferable. He demanded translations of the news coverage and explanations of the US voting system, and then endlessly feigned outrage at the perceived flaws in the system. Continually comparing US electoral processes to French ones, he went so far as to claim that the US was “like a third-world country.” He was especially scandalized by the fact that there were long lines to vote, pointing out that there were never any of these problems in France. Well, duh; the US has a population of 303 million, while France has 62 million, including its overseas territories, AND each state has the right to make its own voting laws. There are a lot of things that are wrong about the way elections are done in the US, but the smug superiority of this guy was both exasperatingly stereotypical and completely unnecessary on a night when the US was about to make a historical presidential choice. (I’m also willing to believe that I was a bit biased against him because he looked like a younger, gayer Sarkozy.)
Anyway, all of this was grating on me and I was watching the clock ticking away my chances to catch the last train to Porte Maillot. At around 0h45, I finally suggested to them that I would leave a spare key with them and they could lock up afterwards. I was totally serious about the offer, but nonetheless the gesture seemed to make them feel awkward enough to leave with me. Fine, I just wanted to get to Porte Maillot.
We parted ways in front of my place and I, champagne bottle in hand, headed for the subway. I was lucky enough to make the transfer at Reaumur-Sebastopol to the 4 line and then get to Châtelet, but I missed the connection to the 1 line. While trying to figure out if the garbled announcements in the station confirmed the termination of service, I was approached by a guy with an Anglophone accent asking the same thing. We got talking and it turns out he was heading to the same election party and was Canadian from Toronto. Small world.
We scrambled up to the surface and looked for the night-bus stops. We eventually found the right one (after a bit of confusion) and a little while later we were on our way. The bus ride was long, dropping us off in front of Porte Maillot just before 2h00.
What met us at the Palais M. conference hall / club was madness. From a distance, it was a cluster of young people pushing and yelling, and a few confused-looking older folks caught up in the crowd. Oddly enough, it seemed like almost half of the young folks were French; there was supposed to be a special election party at one of the Paris universities for them, but apparently it was already beyond capacity, so I think they spilled over to this event. In any case, the place looked like an exceptionally disorganized version of a nightclub lineup. There were two besieged-looking staffers from Americans Abroad for Obama checking people’s names off of a list while a few of the security guards were pushing people back.
My fellow canuck, smart man that he is, had a plan. He said, “One sec, I’m working on it,” and then positioned himself in the throng so that he could look over the shoulder of one of the staffers. He got a look at the list and eventually picked out a name that had been already crossed off. Then, he got the attention of a passing security guard and said, “Hey, I’m an American and my friend XXXX is already in there. Could me and my friend go join him?” He checked the list for the name, nodded and then pulled us through the crowd. Yay! I had never tried pulling a move like that at a club, by I filed that tactic away in my mental rolodex for later use.
Palais M. is apparently a club that is often used on the weekends for super-glamorous balls for the young and wealthy in the 16th and 17th arrondissements. This made for an odd and amusing scene inside: two gigantic chandeliers, modern-looking décor, the entire staff wearing 3-piece suits or cocktail dresses, 10€ drinks, but also a decidedly non-glamorous (and multi-racial) throng of people in Obama t-shirts, projection screens hanging in several places around the room showing CNN coverage, layers of Obama posters hanging from the walls. Here’s a few pics and a snippet of video from the event (you can find more photos in my Facebook album):
I stayed there until the end, around 6h30, so there’s no use in trying to recount the whole thing in narrative detail. Instead, here are some interesting anecdotes, in no particular order:
1. During Obama’s acceptance speech, just as he make an applause-producing remark, an older female voice rose up from the other end of the crowd, “You tell him, boy!” After a moment of stunned silence, a younger male voice from the back of the room yelled, “He’s not a boy, motherfucker!” Everyone else in the rooms studiously ignored the exchange and listened to Obama’s speech (awkwardly).
2. There was a DJ working at the club, who was obviously under instructions to play music during commercial breaks. This created some hilarious unintended synchronies between the music he was playing and the commercials passing silently on the screens. For example: while Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” was playing, The London School of Business was airing a commercial that involved a blonde woman with long hair in a slate-grey pantsuit walking around a lawn and speaking in a business-like manner into the camera, as if to say, “Hi! I may have a vagina, but I can frown and slice my hand through the air just like any other asshole manager you’ve met.” There were many other amusing moments like this.
3. Once Obama’s victory had been called by CNN, the DJ seemed to be under instructions to just keep playing music over the broadcast, as if the commentary that would come afterward was unimportant. This annoyed me, since I could see that they were interviewing ecstatic crowds in various places in the US, making comments on the significance of the event and even breaking down and crying. Dammit, I’m a specialist on affect and publics; this is part of what I came here to see. When coverage switched over to a reporter located in Ebenezer Baptist Church (MLK’s church), the crowd mutinied, yelling at the DJ and making various hand-signals to him to cut the music. At first he resisted, clearly confused as to why the crowd would suddenly be interested in the coverage, but he eventually relented and we got to hear a CNN correspondent try to yell into her microphone over the din of people screaming and crying and singing.
4. When the election was finally called for Obama, there was a whole range of reactions. Some people clapped and smiled peaceably—almost with relief—some people screamed and cried and looked like they were going to faint, some people made out, some people exchanged high-fives. I made as much noise as I could, and then got to dancing as the DJ cut the TV audio and put on some music.
5. While I was definitely elated to hear of Obama’s victory, I think the strongest feeling I had were when the CNN coverage switched to Grant Park, Chicago, to cover Obama’s speech. It nearly killed me to know that I could’ve been there if I hadn’t gone to Paris, that I couldn’t be part of the collective effervescence going on over there, that I couldn’t be with my American friends. On the other hand, it finally hit me that this event was a real thing, that I and millions of others could finally feel relief and—for a moment, least—allow ourselves to relax. The mixture of happiness, relief, anguish and longing was really hard on me.
6. Throughout the entirety of Obama’s speech, I kept on having near-hallucinations of a bullet passing through his head in mid-speech. The terror was enough to set my affect-systems on fire, like the adrenaline rush you get when a friend sneaks up from behind you. After the speech, someone pointed out that he had been surrounded on-stage by a wall of bullet-proof glass. WHY DIDN’T SOMEONE TELL ME THAT EARLIER? Jeezus.
7. Throughout the event, light-fingered folks started taking “souvenirs” from the event’s décor. It started with some of the smaller posters here and there, and by the height of the event kids were pulling down some of the large-format glossy (and clearly expensive) posters and rolling them up. The security folks were clearly uninterested in preventing the theft, and the organizers didn’t seem to notice until it was too late. As we left the event that morning, two students in front of us reached up and pulled down a string of plastic American flags. One of the organizers was nearby and he grabbed the other end of the string, yelling, “NO! Stop!! You can’t steal this, too! Motherfucker…” I felt his frustration, although swearing at guests wasn’t particularly classy.
8. There was a sort of V.I.P. section at the party reserved for volunteers of the Obama campaign. My canuck party-companion pointed out that they looked a bit ambivalent about the crowd, eyeing them with apprehension that said, “Where were you when we were canvassing?”
9. As we headed for the subway, my fellow canuck said, “You know, it feels like the crowd didn’t really gel tonight.” He was right. I don’t know if it was the unpleasantness at the door, the separation of volunteers from other attendees, the overcrowding in the club, the odd contrast between the mixed-class crowd and the snobby surroundings or what. Regardless, the crowd never quite felt like it came together as an assemblage of sorts, pulsating with a shared energy. I had kinda hoped for that. That’s why I felt so conflicted when I saw the crowds in Chicago. That was the kind of ecstatic throng I had wanted to immerse myself in.
10. For the record, McCain’s acceptance speech was far more classy than anything he’s said since last spring. There were lots of people during this election cycle expressing disappointment at how McCain’s campaign tactics slid from the decency he had promised to the sort of fearmongering and ad hominem distortions that went on during the summer and fall.
11. When I saw Sarah Palin tearing up onstage during McCain’s concession speech, I was completely unable to feel compassion for her. I didn’t really feel any sort of sadistic pleasure at her defeat (just relief). I consciously tried to muster some pity / sympathy, but I kept on flashing to scenes of her “palling around with terrorists” attack on Obama and the consequent spike in hate speech and assassination threats at her campaign rallies.
So I was going to post an ode to the Comice pear, which is so juicy and pear-y, but then Obama’s granny died and Obama cried during a rally and it was just too much.
So then I was going to write something thoughtful about politics and tears and masculinity and death and parenting. But then I woke up the morning of Nov 4th (I always write my blog notes the day after, obviously) and I can’t concentrate. I’m a wreck. I’m more nervous than an espresso-drinking squirrel. I have to teach English to a class of disinterested French students in a couple of hours and I can’t even imagine how I’ll manage through the 2 hours of class without running to the nearest internet café to check the news.
I don’t want to jinx it, but maybe I’ll buy some champagne after school. I think I’m going to an all-night election-results party here in Paris, although I may just end up watching the whole thing from home. But I think I want to be in a crowd for this.
To my American friends who read this: Please don’t fuck this up, guys; you won’t have another chance for 4 years.
I was so drawn into recounting last night’s conversations in the lineup, I totally forgot to say something about an amusing moment in the club itself.
By the beginning of Reinhard Voigt’s live set, around 3h30, I had claimed a spot with my friends at the front of the room, against the metal stanchions that had been put up around the table where Voigt’s gear was setup. There was a guy standing next to me who was clearly out of it (whether high or drunk wasn’t entirely clear) who leaned against the stanchion with his back to Voigt, facing toward the dancefloor. He had a blissful grin on his face permanently (which suggests the use of MDMA), but he also moved sluggishly and seemed to have trouble staying upright without the stanchion (which suggests alcohol or maybe GHB).
Regardless of his particular flavor of intoxication, he was driving me nuts because he was taking up a lot of real-estate right at the front of the club, and his attempts at “dancing” while leaning on the stanchion meant that he was frequently slamming into me. I’m pretty touch when it comes to the blood sport of claiming space on a dancefloor, so I adjusted my dance moves accordingly.
First, I timed my movements so that we would have as much body contact as possible, in the hopes that he would be creeped out by the physical intimacy and move away from me. I should’ve known better; there’s something about nightclub contexts that makes the touch-phobic men of France suddenly boundary-less. It’s not like he was looking to rub up against me, but he was completely unperturbed that our dancing was turning into frottage.
So I gave up and timed my dancing so that we would just narrowly miss each other. This was a peaceable compromise for a while, until a girl inserted herself between us and started trying to claim some of our space. The other guy was too impaired to put up a fight, so he shifted over once she started elbowing him. I wasn’t going anywhere, so I clamped my hands on the rail of the stanchion stuck my elbows out and grooved in place. She got a few good elbows into my ribs, but I didn’t move. She tried to make eye contact with me a couple of times, presumably to try to stare me down, but I just kept dancing as enjoying Voigt’s set as if she wasn’t there. Finally, after the other guy woke up to the fact that there was a girl next to him and started clumsily hitting on her, she made herself scarce.
Still concerned about marauding girls with sharp elbows, didn’t release my grip on the stanchion when that other guy slid back along the railing to where I was. He wasn’t really dancing anymore, just leaning back on the rail of the stanchion, with his hands wide on the rail to either side of him. My hands were in the way on one side of him, so he had the bright idea to place his hand between mine.
As far as spatial organization is concerned it made sense: my right hand on the railing close to his hip, his right arm crossing mine with his right hand on the railing directly in front of me. However, this economy of space also meant that we were entwined in a sort of staggered embrace. Our shoulders were pressed against each other, with our right arms crossing directly into the other’s personal space. It didn’t help things that his hand on the railing was directly in front of my crotch. From a distance, it probably looked as if he was grabbing my crotch and I was having a go at his ass.
So when I looked in his direction and saw that he was looking right at me, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Our faces were about 10cm away from each other. He leaned in, still looking at me, and then gave me a peck on the cheek. Following that rule that, when in doubt, mirroring is the best behavior, I leaned in and planted a wet one on his cheek.
I’m not sure what was going on in his head, but he found this hilarious. He slapped his knee with the sort of slow-mo hilarity that only the very drunk can muster, and then went back to gazing emptily into the crowd and leaning his elbows on the stanchion.
I think (I’m just guessing here) that he thought I was angry at him for invading my personal space, and the peck on the cheek was some sort of half-joking conciliatory maneuver. I was having a pretty good time (despite being constantly elbowed), so I can only imagine that my expression was pretty friendly. Nonetheless, maybe the fact that I was from (apparently) glowering to kissing him on the cheek was the height of absurdity.
Either way, nothing else came of it. He spent the rest of the night splayed on that stanchion, and I spent the rest of the night dancing, my hands still gripping the stanchion possessively.
When I got home last night, around 6h00, I found myself unable to get to sleep right away (maybe thanks to the all the vodka+redbulls), so I watched a bit of TV, read a bit, and then finally fell asleep at when the sun was already shining through the clouds.
So it shouldn’t be entirely surprising that I got up at around 13h00 today. I spent most of the afternoon re-preparing my Internal Review Boards protocol. As it turns out, you’re supposed to mash all of your work into one protocol, whereas I had submitted one for my nightclub fieldwork and one for my daytime interviews. Anyway, it took longer than I had expected to put it all together, so I spent a good part of the afternoon working on that.
After making dinner and watching a bit of TV, I wrapped up a bit of email replies, some reading, prepared the assignment for my English students, and then headed off to Le Rex for an event featuring DJs from the Kompakt label. I had been really uncertain about whether I really had the energy to go out, but finally I was glad that I did.
Kompakt Label Night @ Le Rex
I got to the club at about 1h00 after heading over on a Vélib bike. Already, there was a massive, massive lineup. In fact, there was a massive cash lineup, and a massive guest-list lineup. Well, hell.
I got into the guest-list lineup. I was on the “reduced rate” list, which I got through the Com2Daddy website (well worth checking out if you party in Paris). The deadline to get in was 2h00, so I was pretty confident I would get in under the wire. However, the guest-line line was still pretty long, and latecomers were doing the typically French/Italian/Spanish thing of cutting in line and clustering near the front of the line in a confused mess.
As I was packed in the throng, waiting to get in, I overheard a guy and a girl behind me chatting about their taste in music and recounting their most memorable nights out. I was struck by how detailed their knowledge was of DJs in the minimal techno/house scene; back in Chicago or Toronto, you would only have the depth of knowledge among a small group of aficionados, rather than two random persons meeting by chance in a lineup of easily 100 people.
I was also struck by the way in which they talked about the emotional character of their attachments to the music they liked. The woman, especially, went on and on about Ricardo Villalobos, claiming that his music “gets into my head” and overwhelms her. “The last time I saw him, I didn’t know whether to dance or cry or scream or whatever. I was thinking, what do you want from me?”
This is all really interesting for me because all of her accounts of the effect of his music on her were narratives that started with intense levels of excitement that where polyvalent or ambivalent. It wasn’t clear to her—even in hindsight—whether that excitement was euphoric, distressing, shattering, or enraging. Of course, if she loves Villalobos’s music as much as she does, the excitement his music incites in her must turn into some sort of pleasure more often than not. But it’s nonetheless possible that just the experience of coming undone (or being made to come undone) is a kind of pleasure.
Yes, this notion of the pleasure of coming undone has long been theorized in psychoanalytic streams of thought (especially that of Lacan), where there is a distinction made between plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance (bliss). Plaisir is the obvious kind of pleasure that is narcissistic and reinforces the ego, while jouissance is the sort of self-shattering experience that destroys the ego and makes you dissolve into “bliss.” But what I’m talking about here is more like Jouissance-Lite™. That is, having an experience that pulls you apart a little bit, just enough to be energized with the possibility of coming back together differently, and just enough to feel some relief from the pressure to repeat yourself (to be yourself and not someone else).
Anyway, I still need to develop this out more theoretically, but there’s something to be said for the pleasure of coming undone just a little, and what it does for the daily life you resume the next morning.
Another interesting moment I had in line was with a tallish guy standing next to me. Earlier on in the line, he had actually been speaking to the same woman behind me that I had been listening to. He asked, in a heavy English accent, whether he was in the right line. They had a short, friendly conversation about how long the line was, how excited everybody was to get in for the Kompakt label night, and how annoying the line-cutters were. As it turns out, he was Russian, but had grown up in London, England.
A few minutes later, the jostling of the line brought him in line with me, to my left. At the front of the line, the bouncers started calling out for people with presale tickets to come to the front of the line. The guy next to me looked confused, and then turned to me and asked for a clarification.
Clearly, I was still in Berlin clubbing mode, which means “avoid speaking English in line, and avoid being seen talking with anybody that doesn’t look/sound ‘native’.” This was apparently so because I answered the guy in French, despite the fact that he was clearly Anglophone and had trouble understanding French. I was polite and I took care to explain the situation clearly in French, but I was also doing my best to prevent any sort of connection in the lineup that might create some uncomfortable obligation at the door. This was certainly operating at some reflexive/instinctual level, since I had already heard that he was on the guestlist of the sound guy for the club. He wasn’t going to get turned away and neither would I.
I realized this once I got in the club and felt really bad about it. Later that night, I passed him by in the crowd. I made eye contact, put my hand on his arm, smiled and asked him how he was doing. We didn’t really talk that much, since he had drinks in his hand and I had to pee really bad, but at least there was a moment of contact to make up for my long moment of coldness in line.
Oh, and one more thing. As I was slowly inching forward in line and realizing that this was taking longer than I had expected, I gave some thought to calling my friend Molly, who works as a PR / booking person at the club. If she was still upstairs in her office, she might be willing to come down and bring me up to the front of the line, like she did last week. It took a while to punch the SMS message into my phone, and by the time I was getting ready to hit “send,” the people in front of me were let into the club and I looked up to see Molly heading into the club with two friends of mine and one of the DJs for the evening.
I called out her name and she looked over to me, recognized me, smiled and gave me this look that said, “There you are! What are you doing waiting in line when I was right here?” Next time, I’ll just call ahead, methinks. Anyway, we exchanged kisses and then she headed into the club.
When I got to the doorman, he was all smiles and friendliness. He looked me up on the Com2Daddy list, but then smiled again at me and down the stairway, “1 person!” Notably, he didn’t say “1 person, reduced rate,” which is what he should’ve said. So instead the woman at the ticket booth gave me a free pass and I got in without paying anything. I’m not sure what happened there, but I think Molly said something to the doorman before she went in.
thankfully did a minimal set (rather than her less lovely electro sets), which was occasionally marred by some technical glitches (or bad mixing)
Reinhard Voigt:
very good live set. I hesitate to say “excellent” because he was really fond of high-pitched tones and Roland-303-style “acid” lines, which got old really fast. A proper minimal set, though.
Great set, especially at the beginning. His first few tracks completely re-created the sound and ambience of my Berlin summer. The same sort of driving basslines, swinging house rhythms, sparse textures and clicky-glitchy sound samples. The set went south after a while, and my friends left, scandalized, when he dropped Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” I didn’t mind, but I left shortly afterward as well, around 5h30.
Happy Halloween! I’m sad to say that I didn’t have the time and energy to dress up in costume this year. Mind you, the Parisians aren’t really into Halloween. Apparently, there was a fashion for observing the tradition in Europe about 10 years ago, but it’s fallen off now. On the other hand, the French do observe Toussaint (all saint’s day, Nov 1), which they usually spend at home with their family, much like Thanksgiving in the US / Canada.
So, don’t have much to show for Halloween, but here’s a picture from my friend Amy / SmittenKitten dressed as Bjork in the infamous Swan Dress.
Tonight, Fantômette was booked to spin at a club called Barramundi, which I had never been to before. Afterwards, she was booked at an afterparty called Jett about a 15-minute walk from the first club. I was braced for a long night.
I first went out with a friend for dinner at Les Trois Marmites, which was perhaps not the best idea. It was delicious as usual (I had rabbit in tarragon sauce), but the portions are also famously huge there, so I was feeling overstuffed and sluggish when it came time to go out. It also didn’t help that we drank two bottles of wine between us, which made me a bit sleepy. Nonetheless, I put myself together and headed over to the club.
Halloween @ Barramundi
I got to the club around 1h00 and it was still pretty empty. S. (from last night) and his girlfriend, D., had just arrived as well, so we checked our coats and went down to the main dancefloor.
Barramundi is a much swankier place than we would usually frequent for clubbing, and just the décor made us feel a bit out of place. Also, the confused-colonial style of the interiors—African masks in alcoves; batik patterns on the walls; Indian temple doors—marked the place with a sort of ostentatious privilege that didn’t quite go with the techno-kid style here; Parisian clubbers prefer to sublimate their privilege into shiny futurist interiors or gritty “underground” venues.
Anyway, you can go to their website for some prettier images of the space, but here are the pictures I was able to take with my camera. The flash horribly over-exposed the dark-brown interior, but the low and very warm lighting made my non-flash pictures come out really dark. Nonetheless, they’ll hopefully give you an idea of what I mean.
Anyway, you can imagine the irony that the security and bar staff were almost exclusively Black / Arab, and there was one diminutive Central-American guy who’s job apparently was to stand near the dancefloor and immediately clean up any spills. The empire lives! The bar and security staff were super-friendly, by the way, which made me feel only more conflicted about the whole thing; surly service might’ve reduced the discomfort of partying in some nostalgic memorial to colonial expansion.
This guy was spinning as we arrived and I only caught maybe the last half-hour of his set. I can’t say that I much enjoyed what I heard, though. In French, you might describe his set as pouet-pouet, which is onomatopeic for "honk-honk" and translates into something like “generic” (in a bad way), “mainstream” or “unsophisticated.” I’m not a big fan of dumping on the mainstream and invoking classism/elitism, but I’ll admit that I’m not much pleased when a DJ set sounds like a top-of-the-charts radio broadcast. While all of the records he was putting down were electronic stuff, they were a jumbled mix of styles, mostly clustering around a noisy—and, to my minimalist tastes, overburdened—trance and hard-techno.
I see this guy’s name everywhere on Paris flyers, especially as a headliner for “minor” club nights and venues. I remember seeing one of his tracks feature on a MixCD of Matthew Herbert (Let’s All Make Mistakes, 2000), so I expected to hear some relatively pleasant minimal. His set was probably the best of the evening, with a solid selection of minimal house that didn’t necessarily blow me away, but certainly got me dancing. He occasionally trended toward coarser, more frenetic tracks, which didn’t work in the under-populated club space. The resto-club, with most of the tables and chairs stored away, could easily accommodate 200 people, and there were maybe 50 people at most that evening. So the extra-heavy tracks felt a bit out of place.
Fantômette and I talked about the difficulty of filling a nightclub space in Paris. On the one hand, it seemed like there was a lot of competition between various nightclubs, and there wasn’t the constant influx of European tourists flooding the clubs every weekend like in Berlin. Also, the cost of partying in Paris (10€ drinks, for example) makes people less likely to go out and party.
Fantô has been thinking about starting another series of club nights (after a break from Happy People Only), but she’s worried that the same thing will happen to her that happened here tonight. That is: organize an event, bring in a set of DJs, but only fill about 25% of the capacity. What I suggested was to start at a small venue, so that the people who do come get the feeling that the place is packed, and thus popular / successful. Then, as your attendance numbers begin to exceed the capacity of that place, you shift to a larger location. In my experience, there needs to be a certain “critical mass” density of people in a space before a group becomes a crowd and a soirée begins to feel like a party.
I’ve heard good things about Jeff K from various sources, including Fantômette, but I was rather underwhelmed by his performance tonight. His set started out solid—if more on the thumpy, heavy side of techno—and soon lost coherence. It eventually became a similar sort of mish-mash of styles as DJ Gilda earlier that evening, with a heavy emphasis on trancey and hard-house tracks with lots of vocals. At one point, D. rolled her eyes, waved her hand and declared the sound to be généraliste; that is, unimaginative and banal. Ouch.
I don’t know if Fantômette had been warned in advance, but she found herself going a back-2-back set with this other DJ. It did not go well. To begin with, his style was all noise and thunder, staying within the territory of noisy, pounding “big-room” techno. So Fantômette would put down two finely-wrought, spacious and airy minimal house tracks, and he would follow with two tracks of thundering bluster. It also didn’t help that he was clearly not entirely sober, as he made several really obvious mixing errors (including a couple of total trainwrecks) and didn’t seem to be the least bit disturbed by it. Fantômette suffered through the experience with admirable diplomacy, but I don’t see her repeating a booking with this crew. Fantômette is, I think, in a position now where she doesn’t need to say yes to every booking that crosses her desk.
By about 5h30, we were all a bit tired and not feeling up to the afterparty. As D. pointed out, we probably would’ve been in finer form to keep partying if the main event here at Barramundi had been more fun and exciting. The awkward mess that was Fantô’s ping-pong set with Alyotis, however, didn’t leave us in a festive mood. We gave our best wishes to Fantô as she prepared to head over to the afterparty event, and we made our separate ways home (in horrid, cold rain).
My daytime activities were thoroughly unexciting, so instead allow me to present this picture:
Voilà! This was taken a day after I got my new haircut, so this is Luis with an Election Beard and Jarhead-style haircut. I haven’t stopped getting compliments for the new look, so maybe I’ll stick with it for awhile. I’ll still go through the ritual of shaving the beard after the election, but I might let my scruff grow in a bit more from now on. I may not be a facial hair person, but if all my friends like approve, I’m not going to ignore ‘em.
Anyway, after an evening of being somewhat productive and having dinner, I headed over to Yono in the Marais around midnight to catch Fantômette and another one of my friends, S., who was making his DJ debut tonight. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I was nonetheless impressed with just how many of our friends came out on a Thursday night to support S. Our crew made up at least 50% of the people in the bar tonight.
Anyway, S.’s set was great. He has excellent taste in music (or, to be precise, we have similar tastes), so I enjoyed every track he put on. He still needs to work on sequencing the tracks so that they follow each other in a coherent way and some of his transitions were a bit rocky, but all of that comes with time. Either way, I was happy to see another member of our group launch himself into the world of musicking.
I had an odd moment of passion (in the non-sexy sense) today.
On the way to work by bike, I was riding along one of the bike lanes with a guy in front of me that was pedaling at a rather leisurely pace. As we approached an intersection, where I would have more room to pass him, I started to approch him on his left. Just then, he slowed down, swung his bike idly to the right, then swung it back around to the left and started to make a left turn across me. I made a surprised sort of "Ep!" sound and slammed on my brakes, and he finally looked over his shoulder and saw me in time to stop as well. Our bikes slammed together as he pushed me against one of the metal poles that run along most sidewalks in Paris, but neither of us was hurt.
Eyes wide, he looked over his shoulder at me and said, "Excusez-moi" (Excuse me). I wasn't in the mood to make a big deal out of the incident, so I said, "C'est pas grave" (It's no big deal) and got back to pedaling across the intersection before the light could change. In the few seconds it took for me to cross the intersection, something must've clicked in his head, because he suddenly started yelling at my back, "Hey! Look people in the eye when they apologize to you! Don't just roll away like that!" and so on.
This was an odd thing to say for several reasons, not least of which the fact that eye contact in France is less often a gesture of forthrightness / sincerity and more often one of desire. Also, he made a left turn without looking over his shoulder and caused a collision that could've been a lot worse (especially considering that there were cars and trucks sharing the street with us); I could've yelled at him and made a big scene, so it was odd that he would decide—after a moment's pause—to get angry and yell at me for not doing enough to acknowledge his apology.
But, after some thought, I think it was precisely my lack of fury that sparked his. Most traffic-related incidents in Paris—however minor—involve shouting, cursing and hand gestures. I think that this guy expected me to yell at him, and then he would get to yell at me and we could both go on with our day, convinced that the other was an asshole. This is the transaction that he was prepared for as he looked over his shoulder at me, wide-eyed. His affect-systems were wound up in preparation for conflict, and when I dismissed the incident and left him behind with his enervation, his affect discharged along a different path; what should've been an argument over who was at fault for the collision became an attack over a lack of recognition. With all of this in mind, I think those few seconds of silence between "Excuse me" / "It's no big deal" and "Hey! Look at me when I apologize!" represent a confusion as to how to proceed, and the subsequent outburst reveals an anger at being rendered socially inarticulate.
Anyway, this whole episode reminds me of a line of thinking I had once been developing around apologies and coercion. Apologies (or rather the social norms we have for them) do not only express remorse but also place a demand on the wronged party. "Excuse me," "Pardon me," are both in the imperative mood in English (as they are in French). But even the phrase, "I'm sorry" carries with it an expectation that it will be answered with, "It's alright" or "I accept your apology."
Say, for example, that person A does something really shitty to person B. Person A apologizes, but person B is still hurt and angry and refuses to accept the apology. In response, person A criticizes person B for being unreasonable, petty, uncharitable or unforgiving. By the end of this story, person B has become both the victim and the villain.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the verbal formula of apology can be recited at any point after a damaging event, but the affective charge built up by the event takes its own time to dissipate (or harden). In other words, if you're still hurting from the impact of the event, you might not be in any mood to absolve the person responsible, and yet you feel social presure to do so.
As dramatic as this comparison will sound, it's worth considering the role of the apology in the archetypal abusive relationship. A beating one night is followed by apologies, flowers and tears the next morning. If you refused your abusive lover's apologies that morning, that would just become the excuse for another beating. It's hard to refuse the apology of one who can hurt you again.
At the larger levels of social justice / politics of greivance, an apology can delegitimize anger and pain in a way that is disempowering. Anger can be an important affect for political action, and an apology (espcially when it's not followed up with reparative action) can be seen as a strategy for robbing the aggrieved group of the moral right to anger and thus deflating their movement. A state may say, "Sorry about the genocide / colonization / slavery," and this leaves the addressees with the choice of giving up on their anger or being vilified as resentful and stubborn. "We said sorry, isn't that enough?" makes any ensuing oppression the fault of the faulted for not accepting those terms of conciliation.
Certainly, there's a lot to be said for ethical and religious arguments that encourage the release of anger (Buddhism is one example, but the Christian imperative to always forgive is similar), but anger can also be an engine for change—much like hunger, desperation and pain. Moreover, the coercive aspect of the apology that I'm outlining here is that it doesn't so much release anger (or pain) as force the aggrieved to relinquish and disavaow their anger.
I recall, several years ago when Zizek came to teach a seminar at UofC, he made a similar argument regarding the political importance of resentment. As he was passing through a tangent that touched on seemingly every war in recent European history, he suggested that sometimes the political expression of anger isn't a request for an apology, but rather a demand that injustice / harm be recognized as such. As he re-framed it, the political conversation went like this: "We feel guilty about what we did; accept our apology so that we can be unburdened" "Fuck that. We don't care about your burden."
So I doubt this gets us much closer to a path for resolving entrenched conflict or anything as grand as that, but maybe it helps explain why an apology sometimes makes things better, and sometimes worse. And it might also explain why that guy on that bike this morning found himself yelling at the person he nearly knocked over.
For realz, yo. There were other amusing things that happened today, but this is by far the most awesome.
Now, I don’t just mean that I made alioli with a hand-blender or something. I made it WITH A MORTAR AND PESTLE. That is how hard-core I am.
So just to review: alioli (or aïoli) is a sort of mayonnaise that is made with a clove of garlic as the basic emulsifier rather than an egg. Originally from the Provençal / Catalonian regions, this recipe was traditionally made by crushing some garlic into a smooth paste and then adding mustard and oil until it takes on a mayonnaise-like texture. Egg yolks are sometimes added to speed up the emulsion, but the “real thing” involves just salt, garlic, oil, with a bit of mustard and a bit of lemon juice.
Here is a more general recipe for the sauce (although I disagree with the author’s use of egg), but here is what I did tonight:
Take 2 large cloves of garlic, peel then slice finely and throw into a pestle (in retrospect, one was more than enough)
Add salt, a little splash of olive oil, and a half-teaspoon of Dijon mustard.
Pound and pound and pound. The garlic should turn into a paste.
At a certain point, the olive oil you had added will disappear into the paste. At that point, add just enough oil to cover the paste and start pounding again.
As the paste absorbs the oil, repeat the previous step again.
When the paste starts getting a bit stiff, add the juice of half a lemon.
Pound until the juice is absorbed, and then start again with the oil.
Keep going until the paste starts getting stiff. NOTE: It’s very hard to get the sort of “hard” mayonnaise emulsion you get from store-bought mayonnaise, so don’t push the emulsion too far.
Now, I threw the entirety of the mixture over a super-large bowl of mâche greens and called it an appetizer. I should’ve left the alioli to mellow out a bit before eating, as the two cloves of raw garlic were strong enough to make my mouth hurt. I’m a big fan of spicy food, but even I had trouble finishing. Also, I stank of garlic for the rest of the night.
Most of my day was pretty uneventful. There were really only two amusing or interesting things to mention.
The first was that I had forgotten about daylight savings time this weekend, so I got to bed an hour early than I needed to and I headed out for work an hour earlier than I needed to. This was actually a good thing, since I spent well over ½ hour looking for a place to park my Vélib bike. All of the stations around my place of work were full—all six of them. In the end, I dragged the bike down three flights of stairs to an underpass roadway called Chevaleret and parked at a Vélib station that is always free (because it’s on a street that is accessible by three flights of stairs).
Anyway, having gotten up an hour early meant that I actually got to work on time instead of nearly 1 hour late. Gah.
In the afternoon after work, I head over to a “coiffure masculine” (the French equivalent of a barber shop) near my place to get my hair cut. I ducked my head in, still drenched after biking home in the rain, and asked if the lone barber had an opening. He told me to sit down while he finished on the guy in the barber’s chair.
I was encouraged to see him work meticulously on the short-cropped hair of the guy before me. Although the guy was balding around the crown, the barber gave him a short and slightly shaped coif (pointed at the middle and the front) which didn’t try to cover the bald spot, but rather made it blend into the rest of the haircut. I don’t have a bald spot (thanks, parents!), but it was a good show of his skills.
Whenever I go to a new hairdresser—especially “masculine” ones—I’m always worried that I will get “Male Haircut #5” or some variation thereof. You know what I mean, the short-cropped, no-nonsense haircut that guys sport when they want to ensure that there is no chance that they are “gay” or a “sissy.” So when I finally sat in the chair and said, “I need this really, really short on the sides and back,” I was braced for disaster. As I always tell myself in these situations: I look pretty decent in a buzz cut.
Well, in the end, I got a jarhead cut. That is, the hairdresser gave me a military-style, somewhat rectangular haircut: buzzed to the quick on the back and sides, and just long enough on top to sit flat. To his credit, it wasn’t your basic jarhead cut, but rather the fine-tuned, shaped version of what a professional stylist would imagine a jarhead cut would look like. There were lots of fine touches, such as buzzing the areas above the temples a bit closer than the rest of the sides and back. I’m not sure if it’s exactly what I wanted, but it looks pretty good. It goes well with my “election beard.”
Oh right, my election beard. I should probably explain. I’ve never been a facial hair person; the last time I lived in Paris, I grudgingly conceded that a bit of scruff made my face a bit leaner. However, I had a moment of brilliance a week ago. During hockey playoff season in Canada, hockey team members as well as many of their fans let their beards grow for the entire time that their team is in the playoffs. When their team is eliminated from the playoffs or finally wins, the shaving of the “playoff beard” is something of a ritual. Anyway, it’s a superstition similar to wearing a team jersey while watching soccer or football.
So here’s my idea: I don’t have an “Obama” team jersey, but I can certainly grow a beard. As it turns out, I’m very good at growing a beard. Only one week after putting down the razor, I already have full coverage of my face. It’s rather itchy and kinda driving me crazy, but if there’s any possibility that it will edge an Obama presidency closer to reality, I’m all over it. I haven’t managed to take photos quite yet, but they are soon to come. I look like some sort of military “bear” type. I just need a few tattoos and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off.
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