"It's
easy to get mass movements moving." -Le Marquis de Sade in Marat/Sade
by Peter Weiss
The
thing you must understand about Paris is that it is NOT a night town.
...but
it's trying.
Went
out Saturday night. It's become sort of a Saturday night tradition
for me to go to parties and meet new people. It's very rare that
anybody over twenty years old meets anybody interesting in most of the
bars in this town, and usually these private parties are the best things
happening. Well this one let out kind of early, so around 1:45am I
hit one of the allegedly "late night" spots. I get there
with my friend DJ Whistlepunk, we get our coats off, start dancing, and
the lights come up and they start playing the Oscar the Grouch song from
Sesame Street.
I
thought it was a fluke. But then we tried six more bars on the
same street. Zero Zero had its shutters down. The Kitch wouldn't serve
us any booze and were really polite about not letting us sit down. The
third bar didn't have a name but the bar tender flicked out the lights
and ran to the back when he saw us coming... tripping over a table and
knocking over a pitcher of water and a tray of glasses along the
way. But that only slowed him down man... he popped right back up
and hobbled his way to the back.
We
passed some bar where there was a bouncer who had three people outside
and wasn't letting anybody in and we were waved in by the doorman at Le
Charbon. The music was better than the fifteen minutes we spent at
the first place, but there was nobody there that I wanted to see.
This
is in contradiction to Chicago, London, New York, Barcelona, Istanbul,
Beirut, Constantinople, and Scranton.
But it all makes sense when you ponder that there's no 7-11 in this
town. There's no 24 hour Denny's. There's no 24-hour
ANYTHING. They're trying to live-up to the night life of other
cities... but they have no idea how that's done. Half the people in
charge of planning this transformation have never even been to another
city.
But
the night bus system finally works... You won't have anywhere to go, but
once you get there you can at least get home.
(And
coming in January you can check out Take on Paris LIVE!)
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