Sunday, June 01, 2008

I love the nightlife...

I like to boogie, at the disco ahaaa oh yeah...
That's how old I am, my darlings, but not Precambrian enough to pass on the chance of a dip into the fabled Buenos Aires nightlife, which indeed starts quite late and ends much, much later.
We first had a couple of rounds of cocktails at the stuffy Faena bar, which is very beautifully and ostentatiously decorated by one Phillipe Starck and populated by an ostentatious, albeit not so beautiful, crowd.
I stayed at the Faena when it had just opened and it seemed that le tout Buenos Aires came to see and be seen. The crowd last night goes to show that faddish fickleness is not the exclusive province of New York. The crowd last night was (I'm sorry to sound like a snob, but if it's any consolation I didn't like the opening crowd either) probably the local version of the bridge and tunnel posse, but way too long in the tooth and mostly smoking cigars. It was so defensively square and middle class, it was almost heartbreaking.
So then we all went to Crobar, (circa 2 am) of which there is a hangar here too. Never been to the other ones, but this one was pretty impressive. There were oodles of supplicants (at a ratio of about 17 gentlemen per lady) at the door and at first it seemed insurmountable, but a brazen colleague of mine just went straight to the rope, like Moses on a mission. He was asked if we had a table, were on the list (club ridiculousness is a global condition) and he said: "No, we are tourists and we want to come in". The rope parted like the roiling waters of the Red Sea, to reveal of course, five and a half people inside.
Imagine saying that line to the steroid-enhanced, recently released from a maximum security prison, NY bouncers: We are tourists. Open Sesame.
You think?
Anyway, I am so old that the crowd seemed like kindergartners on a rampage to me. Lots of young, young, young bands of hipster males, to their credit, dancing by themselves, or after many more drinks that they could handle, hitting desperately hard on young, young, young girls who looked older and wiser than them.
The music was pretty good at the beginning (like in Faena, really good) and then as is usual, the later, the more crowded, the more horrible the music. Either Djs are secret sadists, like dentists, or people have no taste.
I survived by drinking my 3.5 vodka tonic of the night and the complimentary version of Red Bull they gallantly ply you with in order to ensure you keep drinking. I would have loved to know what poison it had that kept me so buoyant and alert, but it was too dark and strobey to read the label.
We made it home after 6:30 am and still left some of our more hardcore buddies behind. Today, I have a hole of sweet tangy goo where my stomach should be, I am sleep deprived, hoarse from smoking and inhaling everybody else's smoke (no mayor Bloomberg here), but not particularly hungover.
However my plan of hitting the gym and/or the pool has been scratched indefinitely.

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