The first time that I ever visited Paris was when I was twelve, and my parents had taken us there on an epic European sojourn. We traveled as children might, woken up at every morning with a schedule that our parents had determined for us, and obediently going along with whatever their agenda may have been. I had gone again when I was nineteen, after OlderSister had secured a semester abroad in Paris and my mom and I had gone along to help her look for an apartment. My mom had fallen ill on the trip, and so left us to our own devices. So, aside from the occasional appointment to look at apartments in the city, I found myself in this foreign country and for the first time, had to ask myself, "well, what do I want to do while I'm here?"
So, being a nineteen year old sci-fi/anime/gamer geek, I just grabbed the phone book and started looking for music stores, bookshops, game/hobby stores and comics places. Then, I took out a map of the city and started penciling in rough guesstimates of where the addresses were. When I realized that so many of these places were clustered in the streets around the Marais and the Universite De Paris, I thought, "well, this must be where all of the cool kids hang out."
That is how I spent a wet and rainy winter week in Paris, trawling through record crates and dusty bookshelves, trying to parse the way French electro nerds pronounced "Aphex Twin" or digging into a whole parallel universe of comics that I would never see in North America. I learned about how you could look at a Paris Match to find out about big shows and popular concerts, but to get the skinny on underground bands or alternative clubs, you had to slip down to the FNAC at Les Halles, and look for flyers slipped in between CDs in the bands of your choice.
Since then, I still have an urge to lapse into that form of exploration planning -- look up interesting or neat neighborhoods and just spend a day wandering around. Nowadays, it's easy to shortcut the research phase and just Google "
best comic book shops paris" or go on Songkick to see which artists from your Spotify library are playing in Paris on a given weekend. Moreover, there are sites like Unlike, Afar and TripAdvisor that cater to a curated selection of tips and recommendations taken from fellow travelers just like you. Social travel advice! If you're a San Francisco hipster, here's a place in Berlin that purports to serve an authentic
Mission Dolores burrito. For you edgy musical aficionados visiting Paris, go to
Bimbo Tower to indulge in your appetite for Kazakh klezmer dubsep.
For a moment, while doing this research from afar, I wondered if this was all getting a little self-limiting. Like, what's the point of travelling halfway around the world and visiting a foreign culture if you're just going to spend it hanging out in places similar to where you'd hang out if you were at home? In heavy business travel, there are times where one just spends their entire visit in a new city shuttling between airport, hotel and corporate office, inhabiting a sort of homogenous meta-geography marked by uniformly flourescent lights, interchangeable bedrooms and bland chicken salad sandwiches. Bouncing from book store to book store across Europe didn't seem as limiting, but really, how diverse can book nerds in different cities be?
Well, I was reminded once I arrived, it's all in the details really. Yes, at their heart, French music shops aren't that different from American ones. But there is something about the context of the neighborhoods that they're situated in -- about the way that one has to wander past cafes and courtyard apartments and can imagine the lives of your fellow foreign comics nerds beyond the shopping -- there is something in all of that which is appealing. The shop itself isn't that different, but because of the similarities, it gives you a reference by which to view the rest of the culture.
While planning the trip, I had looked on Songkick and saw that this band called The Chromatics were playing while we were there. A band out of Portland, I had come to the Chromatics by way of a fantastic
cover of "Running Up That Hill" and I had emailed LittleSister to see if she knew of them and was interested in the show. She replied in, like, 30 minutes. "OMG, yes! and if Glass Candy is also playing, buy tickets NOW"
ok, then.
I didn't know Glass Candy but the Internet informed me that they were basically a related side project with heavy Italian disco influences. Not my usual cup of tea, but travel is all about broadening horizons. So, from the comfort of my back porch in Somerville, I parsed through FNAC's French website, bought two concert tickets for a show in Paris featuring a band from the Pacific Northwest, got the PDF's and printed them out. Because, again, we live in the future.
Which is how LittleSister and I found ourselves milling about this old cabaret called La Cigale, quietly eyeing the crowd and trying to peg archetypes.
"I bet that guy's the sort of dude who's like a total scene die-hard. He's probably got three shows lined up tonight and is just hopping from bar to bar."
"I bet that girl's the fresh young university student who's super excited to be going to her first batch of real concert shows and in three months, she's going to start writing music reviews in her school paper."
"No, actually, you're dating yourself. Nowadays, she'll just be setting up a tumblr and a twitter account."
The crowd in the venue seemed really light, and we both felt a little puzzled by that. Then, once the Chromatics took stage, a mass of people suddenly began to materialize; reminding us that the French have long been masters at the art of arriving fashionably late. The show itself was great, also marked by an infectious crowd energy that may less be a mark of the French being energetic dancers and more of a reminder that Boston concert crowds are more reserved than most.
Still, the vibe was nothing compared to when Glass Candy came on, and the crowd lost its collective shit, exploding into this crazy, lusty dancing frenzy as soon as the first bars of the first song came on. It was weird and wild and one of those concerts that ruins listening to the CD (or Spotify playlist) afterwards because no studio recording will ever live up to that sort of live experience. The singer was this dynamo of blonde nuclear dance cold fusion, pumping out pulses of energy into the audience and watching them amplify it back at her. She crowdsurfed through the last three songs, which is something I've never seen before in an electronic act, and judging by her face, something I don't think she's seen either.
Then, at the end, the singer started hauling fans onto the stage so that they could all start dancing with her, which then progressed into another crowd surfing session on the stage; holding her up like some sacred idol. It was crazy and weird and a memorable kind of strange. Afterwards, LittleSister and I were quiet for a few minutes as we walked back to the Metro. Then I said, "well ... that happened."
"yeah, I kind of knew that Parisians like to party, but that was kind of wow."
"well, to be more precise: Parisians like their disco. This is the country that gave us
Justice,
Air and
Daft Punk."
"point."
yeah, nearly 20 years later, still looking for where all of the cool kids hang out.