antipopper

I’m recovering from Club Arak. I danced until my body turned into some kind of fuzzy gas, a weird kind of sublimation.

I wonder, though, about the rising tide of exoticist voyeurism at such events: a teeming horde of leering Anglo fucks dressed up in appallingly clueless “Arabian/Oriental/Asian” fantasy gear. And how is this connected to the potential for “self-Orientalisation”? In the final calculation, is the “Arabness” projected by Club Arak an invitation for the sleazy imperialism of racial fetishists? Of course, no such “final” calculation can ever be made, and the most persuasive argument against this is to consider the dynamic that’s usually approached as “who owns the space?”. When Nicole brought the house down with a fabulous rendition of “I Will Survive” in her best cabaret Arabic, it surely wasn’t “on her own terms” as an authentic Arab (the suggestion of drag undermined this implicitly), but it was nonetheless on terms that engendered autonomy. The sexiest boys on the planet (that’s you, Patrick), poaching the “feminine roles” of Arabic dancing as a kind of joyous (but nostalgia-free) cultural reclamation, are another illustration of this. And it was good to catch up with everyone.

Postscript: last night actually shook me up a bit, because I noticed that I was around three people on the dancefloor that I actually hadn’t seen all together since our experiences at Woomera two years ago. When Caro and Hon came over for dinner the other night, the subject came up, and they told me that they didn’t leave each other’s side for two weeks after leaving Woomera. I had to admit to them that when I arrived back in Sydney, I had nobody to talk to. Lena was overseas doing community music stuff in London, and I came back to an empty house, and slowly went insane.