SOCIO NOCTURNE BY CAMILLE SALMON

“My little life as a production assistant in the audiovisual industry, I understood at 27 that it wasn’t me. But once I had the luxury of throwing everything away, the New Hire Contract and 9 to 6 hours, I had to make money while waiting to see in which direction(s) my new professional life would take. “ What do I have to do to work for you ? “I dared to say one evening in 2007 at the bar of 5 Avenue de l’Opéra. A few days later, I discovered the inner workings of my favorite club.

Yes, I was working in a toilet. But what a dump.

Embraced by hallucinated technoid bits, from the most animal House to the confidential and trippy minimal (thanks Marco).

The urinals were shaking under the bass of the heaviest West Coast hip hop. The mirrors reflected the riffs of infernal guitars to infinity.
We regularly exhumed, especially from six o’clock in the morning, Brel’s songs, dance hits from the nineties that we were not ashamed to praise, or providential italo disco melodies unknown to Franck Dubosc’s fans.

The stage of the mini-scene hosted memorable concerts as well as ballsy conceptual











and finally winning: from the hysterical I-pod Battle to the oh so great, democratic, irreplaceable, mythical for all lovers of all dances, Colette Dance Class.

Behind my little bar, I was enjoying and disgusting myself according to the mood of a pseudo-hype or pseudo-nerd crowd, teenagers with beards, thirtysomethings with caps, pathetic chicks, magnificent homos, fashion journalists who were broke but still in Comme des Garçons, self-proclaimed genius students convinced they had discovered American Apparel before anyone else, models whose lack of body insulted the beauty of their face, and who almost threw up in front of my candy business but not in front of a vodka-red berry.

From a strictly human perspective, I have experienced the most profound kindness and the most inane condescension. Pascal Nègre snubbed me, Damon Albarn dropped 50 euros on me. A second-rate French actor kissed me by force, Michel Gondry wrote a little note on my cleavage. For the first time I felt like really hitting a girl, and I made friends who stayed friends.

While I was expanding my musical culture and pursuing my sociological study of people who don’t sleep, euros, pesos, pounds and other currencies I still haven’t identified were clinking in my tip jar. I was paid in bundles of dollars, in luncheon vouchers, in beers, in bottles of nail polish, in sushi, in flowers, in kisses, in jokes, in sometimes useful business cards.

The Parisian-Parisian microcosm was stirring there, under my nose, squatting as much as possible in this space where it could hear itself speak. I was well settled, I had the opportunity to make use of this observatory. I love cats. In London I had a blast in Hyde Park with the squirrels. The jackureuil was born.

As soon as he had pulled up his fly and washed (or not, for a third of the cases) his hands, I was luring the clubber with one:
-Hey man, draw me a jackerel!
-Gnhein? A what?

The smile in two seconds replaced the perplexity, and the little work was born. I think that my first jackals would go into the toilet in pairs as soon as my back was turned, because they multiplied faster than rabbits.

In three months I was able to fix a hundred specimens on the corner of my counter. Each of these artistic autographs is unique and symbolizes a moment in the life of PP. Each of the authors has put on paper his imagination, his talent or, failing that, his humor, his poetry, his childhood or his anguish, his degree of alcoholism or any other high, his narcissism or his generosity.

I am privileged to be in possession of every original of this bestiary, and my heart is full of thanks. Because I know that at nightfall they put a fair worthy of the name in the notebook that hosts them, a fair worthy of the golden age of this club. The PP of the time, it was not only for the blasé of the Baron and the repressed of the Baron.

It was really good.

Camille Salmon: [email protected]