Musical Chairs

22 juin 2010 mardi

Fête de la Musique: national French holiday celebrating the first day of summer with live music in every one of the major French cities.

Think Palmer Fest, but add:
• flash dance raves on public squares
• live music on nearly every other block
• windy, narrow streets encumbered with party-goers of all ages
• fountains and fireworks
• impromptu dance breaks
• percussion parades
• wine
• police dogs and firemen sitting on top of their trucks to watch the festivities below
• ice cream shops open until 2 in the morning, complete with flavors like butter pecan, coconut, nutella, lavender, melon, tiramisu, and crème de la menthe, among other delicacies
• DJs pumping out techno in the middle of thick crowds

and meanwhile, subtract:
• maces, tear gas, night sticks, among other forms of police/crowd violence
• burning couches
• police horses and riot squads
• Natural Light, Budweiser, Miller, Keystone, and other forms of piss-water-beer
• open container laws
• bros and hos
• Good Fellas pizza and Wendy’s frosties
• unintelligible crowd chants
• an 11:00 p.m. mass party break-up due to rampant unruly behavior

In short, I’m attempting to draw a distinction between the way that France parties in mass, and the way it goes down in the United States. My French friends kept asking me if we had something like the Fête de la Musique in the states, and the only thing I could come up with was Ohio University’s fest season, but I was reluctant to make the comparison. Although I’ve only been by OU’s fests in passing, I felt extraordinarily uncomfortable and ill at ease each time I was there. I didn’t feel safe, and it was more of an atmosphere of mass chaos and impending violence than anything else. It was nice to be able to sit on a café terrace, listen to music, spend time with friends, and not worry about being trampled by a police horse, or pushed off the sidewalk by flailing bros or stumbling hos in heels.

Vive la Fête!

(Sidenote: while riding on the train from Aix-en-Provence to Strasbourg today, I stumbled across a perfectly pertinent lyric from a Nickel Creek song:
It’s foreign on this side
But it feels like I’m home again
And there’s no place to hide
But I don’t think I’m scared.)