Cheeseburger in Parisdise
I was invited to a costume party last weekend which required each guest to come dressed as a celebrity. I figured Jimmy Buffett was a natural, both because he is my lifestyle role model, and because the “costume” can be reduced to wearing a Hawaiian shirt and chugging rum from the bottle, i.e., calling my normal party behavior a costume.
But it became clear that this was a fateful decision when I learned that Buffett was playing one show in Paris on the night before the party. I walked down to the venue to buy some paraphernalia for the costume, and naturally found myself drawn into the concert.
It was pretty slack and desultory at first, but about halfway through the show, the band went into a killer cover of Southern Cross – a song that could have been written for them – and then Monsieur Buffett proceeded to tear it up for the rest of the night.
One of the many great things about living here is the fun of having typically American experiences completely out-of-context. The annual late-September Buffett concert in Paris has become, like the seven-a-sides in Hong Kong, a ritual gathering point for expats for thousands of miles around. This created a hilarious Anglophone bubble in the middle of Paris. About the only French I heard came from Jimmy at the mic (who, having lived here years ago, still seems to have pretty passable French).
A surprising number of his songs reference the city. In fact, he closed the concert with a great acoustic version of He Went to Paris, which is a song that Bob Dylan cited as one of his favorite tunes by one of his favorite songwriters. Though not many of us here are living a Lost Generation literary life, it still felt very bonding.
Living in Europe has created for me a mostly pleasant sense of distance from a lot of the day-to-day of U.S. politics, hence my limited blogging over the past months. Or maybe it’s just that the warm summer breezes and French wines and cheeses have put my ambitions at bay.
This is an excellent post — and take that, Matt Frost and Peter Suderman! When you’re next in California, Jim, I’ll take out my best rum and fix you a boat drink. And yeah, Southern Cross does seem as though it were written for them.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 27, 10:11 AM · #
How queer that you would make this post today, Jim.
About a year ago I found my relationship with ambition at a breaking point, and decided it was time to sail away. If you had been here at Casa Comstock last September, you would have been pressed into service making the sloop INTEMPERANCE ready for an offshore passage to the West Indies via Bermuda, and you would have heard Souther Cross no less than twice a day.
I spent seven months down South; mostly on French St. Martin (drinking lots of government subsidized wine, and eatin government subsidized bread and cheese) and on St. Croix (where excellent rum is available at the untaxed price of about seven dollars a liter.)
I swam every day. I had excellent surf breaks within paddling distance of my anchorage. I learned to SCUBA dive. I rebuilt the interior of INTEMPERANCE, tripling the size of the galley, while adding more storage room and another bunk. I read books.
When Spring came I debated heading west toward Panama and the vast Pacifc, or North back home. But in the end I decided I had unfinished business that I hadn’t yet given my last, best effort.
So on May 10th we raised our anchor, threaded the channel at Christiansted, and then pointed INTEMPERANCE in a northerly direction. Two tacks and two weeks later INTEMPERANCE was back on her mooring in Lake Montauk.
Souther Cross still gets played a lot. I’m partial to this live version by the original artists. When I get frustrated and feel like I want to sail away again, I bring up the YouTube clip, and know that if it ever really does get to be too much, I can sail away again.
As to why it’s queer that you would post this on today of all days? In a couple of hours I’ll be leaving the autumnal quite of Montauk and catching a bus into the city to tend to some the unfinished business that pulled me home from St. Croix. Specifically, tonight I’ll be a panelist film screening put on by the National Coalition Against Censorship, and expect that some of my ideas about sex and cinema and government funding and art and pornography and the First Amendment are going to strike them as unorthodox.
Since you can’t be there, I hope you’ll raise a toast instead. Rum or wine, taxed or subsidized, it makes no difference. Even a glass of tap water, the gestuere will be appreciated!
— Tony Comstock · Sep 27, 01:07 PM · #
Conor,
I’ve never turned down a free drink in my life, so don’t make the offer lightly.
Tony,
Awesome. About 17 years ago, after burning out on an intense work life that ended with an awful, rainy winter in Seoul, I decided to drop out of life for a while. I took a leave of absence from my firm and headed to the Carib with the goals of sailing the entire island chain, completing a the Grenada triathlon, writing a novel, and building an equities trading model. The only one I completed was the triathlon.
I started sailing at the very bottom of the Carib and made it as far as Bequia (like 5% of the way). At least back then, this was exactly what I always pictured the Carib being, but somehow it never was. Almost the only way there was by boat or lunatic charter flight on a little prop plane. It had a few thousand residents and a crazy little hotel run by a German-British couple, who strangely declared Tuesday to be the one night a week with a “jump-up” (essentially, a beach party). In short, it was paradise.
Like you, I always know that if things get too crazy, I can always go back.
— Jim Manzi · Sep 27, 01:36 PM · #
Oh Jim Manzi, lovely post but I beg you a picture, an illustration, an image of a boat, the sea, a shirt, a bottle of rum. You in a shirt with a bottle of rum…Doesn’t anyone own a camera!
— Ell · Sep 27, 01:46 PM · #
I am bitterly disappointed that you didn’t go as Vin Diesel in Riddick or Pitch Black.
— matoko_chan · Sep 27, 03:57 PM · #
Beautiful, which isn’t a word I often associate with Jimmy Buffet.
— Freddie · Sep 27, 06:00 PM · #