Here's me and my friend Anne at le Chalet des Îles last Friday night.


Anne and me
Marjorie and I attended a soirée at a swanky nightclub on the outskirts of Paris with her friends Anne and Aurelie and sister Deb. It was crazy expensive — 45 Euros for dudes! — and the club itself is situated on a tiny island so you have to take a ferry over to it in groups of about 20; pile into the boat, cross the tiny river in 30 seconds, file out of the boat. It was a crazy scene, preppy and rich, people's outfits getting inspected at the door, guys getting turned away for not bringing girls, etc, and Marjorie and I were the only remotely weird people, but we had a lot of fun even with all the squares. At some point in the night, everyone from our group but Anne and I were in the ladies' room, and two people came up and asked if they could take our picture for some sort of website/magazine thing. We said sure, they took our photo, and then wrote down our e-mail addresses. I just received the photo, along with a note saying that it would be in Infrarouge magazine and on their website for the month of September. (I clicked around a little but haven't bumped into the photo yet.) Anyway, I ended up getting really drunk on tons of free champagne and gin and tonics, and escaped the party to wander around in pitch blackness on the wooded path that surrounds the little island. I inadvertently startled the hell out of about half a dozen different couples who were feeling each other up on benches and in the woods and on the banks of the river. At some point back at the club I had a very drunken conversation with two nice Serbian girls in the men's room. And from there it just gets blurrier and blurrier. It was a really fun and silly night overall, and reminded me I need to do that more.

Friday night, the lovely and amazing Lada La Belle invited me to be her accompagnateur for a "burlesque-retro event" at the grand opening of Paris' NY Club, which is "rebuilt on the ashes of Paris' first strip cabaret," whatever that means! She mentioned burlesque dancers and open bar, so I was already sold! Also, it had been much, much too long since I'd gotten dressed up for a night out on the town in Paris.

Lada invited me to come to her place (that is, my old place) for dinner beforehand. She's an up-and-coming burlesque dancer herself, and she told me in her e-mail, "I want to show you my collection of handmade nipple tassles (not on my nipples)." Drat. Anyway, we hadn't seen each other in about two months! She was so excited I was coming over, she mentioned in her e-mail, "... since seeing you is becoming more rare than seeing the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, the girls (Isa & Lisa) are also coming to give a look to the apparition." Haha, awesome, and all the better because I hadn't seen Isa and Lisa since maybe September or so. The four of us had a great dinner together, cooked up by Lada, as usual, and then we left for the party. Lada only had two invitations, so she and I parted ways with Isa and Lisa and hopped on the Metro toward Chatelet, to locate this new club on the Rue de Rivoli.


My huge melon and Lada's huge... dance moves. Photo stolen from somebody's Facebook.

( More stolen photos... )

The party was great, and there are a million photos on Facebook, if you're so inclined (I even got tagged in a video; that's a first). You can just search for "NY Club grand opening" or whatever. Some highlights from the night include...

Drinking free champagne and free vodka with Lada all night.

Dancing with Lada all night.

Lada telling me "Mah-neeng! Tu danses comme Christopher Walken!" Maaaannn...

And then there's this shouted-over-the-music conversation I had with the boyfriend of one of Lada's dancer friends:

Him: T'es Anglais?
Me: Non, j'suis Americain.
Him: Ah, nobodeez pair-fect.

Ha!

A bit later, two very young, very short French guys in suits stopped me in front of the bathroom to excitedly tell me, "Tu as le meilleur style de la soiree!" -- I had the coolest style of the party. Haha, that was great. They were super excited that I was American, as is often the case with the youngsters, and they asked me where exactly I was from. When I told them I was from Philly, a young lady who happened to be walking by said, "You're from Philly? I'm from Allentown!" The thing is, this was all in French, and she spoke perfect French with no American accent whatsoever, so my drunken brain thought she was just kidding... but then how the hell had she heard of Allentown, Pennsylvania? It turns out she was telling the truth and just spoke way better French than I do, even though we discovered we'd both been here for about the same amount of time. However, I felt a little bit better when Lada's dance instructor told me I spoke better French than she does, and she's been here for ten.

Anyway, when I finally managed to break off my drunken conversation with the lady from Allentown, I stumbled my way into the bathroom, and whilst relieving myself I realized that the guy at the urinal next to me was snorting cocaine or some other type of powered treat. He looked at me with some embarrassment and said "Excusez-moi" as he finished up, to which I assured him it was okay! To me, the most hilarious part is that he addressed me in the formal tense while doing coke in the bathroom of a hipster nightclub.

We left the club at about four in the morning and I walked Lada to a good place for her to grab a taxi home. We waited about fifteen minutes with no luck, and that can seem like forever when it's freezing and you're exhausted. While we were waiting on our corner, a small group of people tried to put themselves a little up the street in front of us so they could steal the next taxi that came by; they knew we were there first and they knew that taxis were few and far between at that hour, and it was clear that they were very deliberately trying to shark us. Of course this happens all the time in any big city, and it's not a huge deal, but there's also no reason to put up with it, and I never do. It's usually easy to just get in front of the person again, showing them you're not having it, or just telling them, "No way, sorry, we were here first," and they'll pretend they didn't realize and they immediately back down. So I politely but firmly told the lady who was putting herself directly in front of us, "No, miss, we've been waiting here fifteen minutes." And, hilariously, she was outraged! She drunkenly slurred, "Non, non, non!" and put her arm out as if to block our way. But she drunk enough that it was easy to just walk around her, while we kind of just laughed in her face while her friends sheepishly looked at us like they didn't want to intervene. There was just one guy in the group, and it's always a riot when the only two guys present have to eyeball each other and size each other up, just in case something bad happens, when it's clear neither wants any trouble, and that was certainly the situation here. After a minute, the group left in another direction, and immediately after, a taxi came by for Lada! Success! A great end to a fantastic night. I barely remember walking home, leaving a trail of clothes from the door to the bathroom, showering and going to bed.

Edit: Whoa, I totally forgot I'm going to a birthday party tonight! So I'll roll up at that other stuff afterward. I'll leave the info here in case anybody else is coming out:

Hey Paris folks, I'm going with Lada to see Alexis' band, Pravda, play at La Flèche d'Or tonight, and then most likely heading over to a party called La Péniche at Concorde Atlantique (a club on a boat on the Seine), and probably staying at least 'til the Metro starts running again around 5:30 or 6am. I'm pleased to have all these distractions at my disposal; I really need some of that right now. Anyway, give me a call if you feel like meeting up! Now then, what to wear, what to wear...

P.S. This video does not feature Alexis, as it was shot before he joined the band.
P.P.S. I hope they play their cover of Frank Sinatra by Miss Kittin.

What an insane week this has been.

( Part 1: Ladyfingers )

( Part 2: Alerte Orange party )

Here are some pictures from the party, from before it really started cookin'...



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And some (mostly crappy, blurry) pictures of Alexis’ bands...

The Dead Sexy Inc.


Stephane, Emmanuel, Alexis.

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Pravda



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The weirdest thing about being at a gothic dance party in Paris isn't the freaks on stilts or the folks with the plastic tubing in their hair and the lights sewn into their clothes, or the seven-foot-tall drag queens or the kids sporting gasmasks and angel wings, no, the weirdest thing about being at a gothic dance party in Paris is that nobody's fat.

Alexis invited me to go to Tokyo Decadence with him and the guys from the Dead Sexy Inc. last night, right around the corner from our apartment at Le Divan du Monde. I always get a guilty thrill out of being on a guest list; you know, you cut the line and tell the bouncer you're on the list and everyone in the whole overdressed crowd cranes their necks to see who (the fuck you think) you are, and it's kind of fun. I'm sure I'm not the only nobody who secretly feels that way. It was weird to be at a nightclub, which is a scene I've tried to studiously avoid for most of my adult life, but it was totally fine. It's also weird to run into people I know in Paris; I keep accidentally feeling like I'm a total alien and have no business here, and then I realize that in fact I've actually sort of become a part of this neighborhood now. And I guess the freaks tend to notice each other and stick together anywhere in the world; throw them all in the same room and some of them are bound to know each other. A French goth girl heard me shouting to Alexis in English over the club noise and grabbed my sleeve and yelled "Welcome!" at me in mid-booty-shaking.

Anyway, I was a good sport and enjoyed being at the club, and it was definitely refreshing to be out of the house, but I did get bored after about an hour of watching kids on drugs dance in plastic clothes, so I came home around 1:30 and accidentally stayed up all night reading White Line Fever, the autobiography of Lemmy from Motörhead, on loan from Alexis. Did you know Hawkwind's first show in America was at the Tower Theater in Philly? Neither did I. That's where I saw my first concert ever, which happened to be Fishbone in 1991, haha. Some band no one ever heard of called Primus opened for them. I was sixteen, and I went with Ben and a couple girls, one of whom liked me and bought the tickets for us. At the time, it was the greatest night of my life, which seems cute and silly now. It was really strange last night to be sitting half-drunk in bed in Paris at age thirty-two and have that memory come flooding back to me. Thanks for that, Lemmy.

Today I'm going to the movies with Courtney and Agnes, and then hopefully finishing a first draft of some poster art for the Dead Sexy Inc., an illustration of the group as oldschool Tales-from-the-Crypt-style zombies. One doesn't really have to twist my arm to convince me to draw monsters.

It's rainy and warm and completely gray today (which is super goth) and I'm pretty happy (which is not).

The other night when Tami was at our place for dinner, Alexis started doing a crazy dance all up in Tami's face for some reason and asked her, "Have you seen ziss sing called tecktonik?" And then he and Lada proceeded to demonstrate this new(-ish) dance and fashion craze that's apparently sweeping France. Then after lots of dancing (uh, them, not me), we all spent a long time on YouTube together, searching for "tecktonik" and watching lots of professional music videos and TONS of crappy amateur videos of French kids dancing in their living rooms.


And now, since that night, I've seen tecktonik mania all over town. Every boy in Paris is sporting a tiny black mohawk and tight white jeans and neon-colored shoelaces. And every girl is sporting... well, pretty much the same exact thing, plus lots of eyeliner. I've seen more t-shirts with tecktonik-related Franglais slogans than I care to count: "Tecktonik Killer!" "I Love Tecktonik!" "Tecktonik Life!" et cetera, all in the same slash-and-burn neon typefaces, all on the same tight black sleeveless t-shirts and tight white polo shirts with the collar popped up. It's all the silliest parts of the eighties and new wave and the nineties and techno all mixed together with a heaping tablespoon of Eurotrash. I have no idea if it's been there all along and I just now noticed it after Alexis mentioned it, or if it really did pop up over night like that. It's a lot like some of the ridiculous styles I saw kids wearing in Italy and Greece two years ago, but suddenly commercialized and homogenized and completely everywhere. Well, I do appreciate anybody who's making an effort to look even stupider than I do, so I salute you, tecktonik kids. And I do kinda wish I could dance like that.