cimorene

Because of my lifelong homebody habits, I have been relatively infrequently to bars, and only four times to clubs.

The fourth time was last night. Let me tell you about it.

At 2 am Wax and I were reading Kradam and Inception badfic respectively when she got a drunk call from a former work mate, Tiny Asshole Mika, insisting she come drink with him. ("How did you know I wouldn't be asleep!" she said. "Must be somebody who knows you I guess," I said. Badum-ching.) After about 10 minutes of importuning, and a brief lecture about how evil Facebook is and why Tiny Asshole Mika should learn about Twitter instead, she gave in because he promised to buy her some cider.

We drank cider under an antique rowboat and a portrait of Tarja Halonen (the president of Finland. She looks like Conan O'Brien), and I said the shape of the cider glasses were very pleasing. Mika tried to get me to steal one but I refused, so he stole one for me. At that point there was no way to graciously decline, so now I have one. Koulu kicked everybody out at 3 o'clock, and we let him drag us to a club called Apollo where he knew the bouncer.

The place was going for a Moulin Rouge effect, with black flocked wallpaper where the flocking was actually made out of this gritty sandpaper stuff and big Rococo mirrors. The upstairs was all red velvet upholstered DJ booth, couches lining the walls, red velvet curtains with gold fringe, and the shittiest eurodance music I've ever heard. It was like some kind of nightmare!

Every song sounded the same as the one before (thanks to the monotonous shitty beats added to all of it, including a horrible remix of Savage Garden's "To the Moon and Back"). There was also an incredible array of Sad, Sad Humanity in wilted mall-rat clothes and weirdly out of place prom dresses and the like, all clustered in a self-conscious blob under the disco balls. I think it's the first time I've really seen that quantity of people dancing like white boys all at once, all anxious head-bobbing and tiny box-steps, with the biggest concession to rhythm generally being elbow movement. ("Look at all the plebes!" "I keep thinking about which community would be right for a comparison, like ONTD, but no, it's on lj, so it can't be plebey enough - it'd have to be some messageboard, right?" "Baby... this club is Facebook.") There were also a lot of incredibly stinky dudes in douchey plaid shirts and one guy in a frock coat. It was too noisy to shout over the music, which was really too bad to dance to in any way. Fortunately we were only there for about 45 minutes, but they were interminable minutes, and it was definitely my least impressive club experience to date.

The other three times were:

When I was 18 I went to a combination hip-hop/country club in the Kansas City area with two cousins. The hip-hop was good and extra entertainment was provided by the country dancers doing polka-like moves even in the hip-hop songs and some young boys practicing break dancing, including spinning on their heads. I was wearing a black one-shouldered top I borrowed from my chavvy cousin, the entire front of which was covered in a tiger's face in silver glitter, and it took 3 days to get the glitter and cigarette smoke out of my hair, which at that time was halfway down my back.

When I was 19 and met waxjism for the first time at the home of devon in Ann Arbor, and we went to an underground goth club in Detroit (after an afternoon at thrift stores and K-mart buying black negligees to construct appropriate goth gear out of). At the time I knew nothing about industrial or goth music and was more interested in tourism - the huge graffiti murals, the kink gear, the red pleather gowns, the naked woman wearing only a fox's tail tied to her ass. And also in groping waxjism of course. This was the day we later counted as our anniversary, up until we actually got married. But in retrospect, this was the most comfortable (not really MY peeps, but at least it's a subculture) and danceable club experience (definitely the best music).

A few years ago Wax's friend V called us on New Year's Eve and convinced us to meet him and his flatmate to see the fireworks and then we spent the wee hours near the dance floor of a club, drinking underwhelming margaritas and listening to said flatmate mansplaining. The music wasn't loud enough to be memorably objectionable at all, so it's ahead of last night right there.

I guess I figured that because heavy metal and hard rock in general are mainstream in Finland, and played on pop and top 40 stations, that the club music would be more rock. But I failed to consider that eurodance is also very popular in Europe and I just don't hear it because I don't know anybody with taste that bad. I wouldn't have thought Eurodance could ever be popular enough to completely muscle out actual pop music, but there wasn't a peep of Britney, Christina, Gaga, Beyoncé, the Black Eyed Peas, or any other mega popstars the whole time. (Of course, eurodance remixes are like 20 minutes long apiece, so the sample wasn't very large in our 45-minute visit. Maybe they'd already used it up.)