Eine kleine Nachtmusik

The other night I went to the opening party of a new academic festival, taking place in Graz. The festival consists of a series of public lectures and seminars about issues like Globalisation, the Arab Spring, and the work of students who call themselves ‘artists’ (usually defined by a cheap SLR and a reckoning that they see true beauty in mundane aspects of life). So I should have expected the amount of intolerable intellectual posers this party would attract. Retro, large-framed paedo-glasses and those eco-friendly cotton shopping bags were in revoltingly pretentious plenitude. Refusal of a good deodorant also seemed to be the way to brag about your artistic and academic ‘independence’. In fact, the other language assistants and I were so clearly dressed for a tidy night of Pitbull and Lady Gaga that we almost fitted in, hitting these kids’ penchant for irony right on the head. Having said this, it was a really fun night and I would definitely go again, but Lady Gaga and Pitbull there certainly was not. With regard to the music, most of the time I felt like I was having an attack. We arrived to a laser show on the dancefloor, set to music that can only be described as interference. The nerd responsible for said laser show was definitely the type to spend too much time in his bedroom in the dark, self-consciously posting that dubstep shit on the internet every five minutes. Since the whole thing was quite experimental, the crowd loved him. (More like an experiment gone wrong in my books though. See http://robinfox.net/projects/laser/. Not quite Flo Rida). When the DJs began their sets, it got a bit less weird (despite one of the DJs carrying his own parasol, even though the venue was deep in the cave of a large hill and it being pitch black and 4C outside). The music was trance and dancing trends were unusual: most people were alone and throwing about their hottest drugged-up aerobics moves, which, frankly, are nobody’s business. To be fair to them, it is hard to dance to Morse code. I definitely had the impression I wasn’t appreciating the music on the profound level that most of them seemed to be, but thought it was fun anyway. The really hard-core ones were wearing earplugs, I suspect to feel closer to their own superior thoughts.