Tabs Issue 68: No illusions

In September, after a night out in Warsaw at Poland’s Communist Party headquarters cum stock exchange [the poetry of this transformation is lost on no one], which somehow turns into several night clubs on weekends, Johnny accurately summed up the experience of nights out as twenty minutes of dancing followed by an hour of either getting a drink, going to the bathroom, or looking for your friends who are either getting a drink or going to the bathroom. That is all fine and we had a great night.

The ground was strewn with broken glass, which begs the question of how much janitorial services get paid at this place. The average age of attendees was around twenty and yet all the music played dated to at least a decade before any of them were born.

The beauty of essentially all Toulouse bars and/or clubs is that they are too small to ever have this issue. The drinking, the smoking, and the dancing are all concentrated in one 10x10m, poorly ventilated area. The bathroom isn’t far either. The downside, of course, is that when you come home you have to burn your clothes and shampoo your hair ten times. The other downside of Toulouse is that, despite the synergies above, it has essentially no reliably good places to dance.

These days, when someone asks me where I go out, I draw a blank engendered by a year of not going out at all and reminiscent of the slight panic I would feel anytime people would come visit me in New York and I’d only be able to recommend that they walk the Brooklyn Bridge. So when Rossi insisted we try to go dancing somewhere I was skeptical. First, we tried Moloko, but they were playing 90s rap for break-dancers, which we are not. Then we went to Borriquito Loco, but it was full of 19-year-olds, which we are not. Finally, he convinced me to stop by Quartier Latin, a place I had never even considered entering as I thought it was for beaufs, a somewhat ineffable label that is a reliable conversation generator should you ever find yourself lost for words with a French person. I think the closest equivalent is how New Yorkers perceive people from New Jersey, or I guess New Jersey in general in the nation’s imagination [obviously not the Garden State version]. Ask a French person to define what a beauf is and, after listing a string of negative attributes including close-mindedness, bad taste, chauvinism, and an affinity for cliche, they will inevitably, eventually say, “on est tous le beauf de quelqu’un,” which means we are all somebody’s beauf, an appropriately philosophical and trite note.

We walked into Quartier Latin as it was playing “Suavemente” and I never looked back. At random points in the evening, the bar staff passed out sparklers. “I have the fire!” I yelled like an idiot the second time I was there. There is no way someone’s hair hasn’t caught on fire. The DJ is a guy selecting songs on his iPhone. The duration of the song is a total mystery: some would last twenty seconds, others would play for their full duration. Rossi hypothesized that the duration of the song was an indicator of the DJ’s drunkenness, where, thinking he’d played the song too long he would cut it off even though it had only been thirty seconds. Sometimes he would introduce song transitions that had absolutely no connection to either the song that preceded them or the one that followed. It was the equivalent of WordArt or of the slide transitions with sound effects that middle schoolers include in their PowerPoint presentations. Masterfully artless.

In the month Rossi was here, we went there a total of three times. The energy stayed comically absurd. The second time, a friend came out as bi and I shouted “go for it, no one cares,” then later, when a friend commented on it positively, I responded by excitedly yelling, “HE’S BI.” Ships in the night. The third time, a girl who came with us danced like a mix of Elaine from Seinfeld and those tube men at car dealerships, then hit another group of girls with her flailing arms, was subsequently corralled into an aggressive conversation she understood little about, then bonked her head against another girl’s as they leaned in to talk to each other. Magic.

At no point did the DJ act like anything other than he was: a dude with a Spotify playlist of random hits. Some mainstays: “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” [a gimme]; “J’irai ou tu iras”, sung by Celine Dion and Jean-Jacques Goldman and having an absolute chokehold on the French: the odds of it playing at a party are at 70% and at 100% for a party of beaufs; “Lady Lay”, a very 70s classic; “C’est beau la bourgeoisie” by a band called Disco Bitch; “Désénchantée” whose chorus comes in a criminal minute and a half into the song, before which you just sway awkwardly; this trash rap song I now love; “Freed from Desire”, one of those songs that you just jump to and that’s exciting to hear when it’s been ten years since you last heard it, and then unnecessary to hear again for ten more years; “I Will Survive,” the version that was the anthem of the 1998 winning World Cup team and which the French muddle through, lyrics-wise, until the part where they just yell-sing “laaaa, la, la, laaaa, laa, la la la la la, laaaaah, la la la” etc….: I saw a guy taking the most passionate drag of a cigarette, belting out the chorus, then furiously making out with his girlfriend; “Temperature” by the one and only Seanuh Paul, of course, which, the last time we went, was followed immediately by “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” an unexpected combination that I will never forget. Playing a Christmas song at a bar: why not? Once, with a person from Ireland and another from Northern Ireland, we walked into a bar in Toulouse where people were joyously singing “Bloody Sunday” with the same fire as “I Will Survive.”

To be clear: I enjoy this place without any irony at all. It is important to have places free from pretension, where you can just be stupid and bop around to guaranteed hits. It is equally important to leave well enough alone: after three times, I will be taking a long break to make sure it doesn’t become stale. I look forward to the evolution of their playlist in a year.