ArtsEtc.

Brittany: Wine, women, song?

RENNES, France — I wouldn't recommend making the trip to Trans Musicales  at the outskirts of Rennes on anything but the bus — and not just because you'll leave too drunk to drive, even by French standards. Immersing yourself in a hot mass of jolly flesh while careening into bizarre characters yelling drinking songs in your ear offers the chance to, well, meet people.
It's a modern-day pilgrimage out to some old airfield where four empty airplane hangars are stuffed with a stage, trippy lighting and bands just big enough to draw a crowd, but not so big that they don't play with desperate intensity. The bus erupts in cheers and high fives as the hangars appear around a bend. These European kids party like they know this is their last shot to leave a stain on their memories from this winter. I say stain because they are drunk. Hell, we're all drunk, but these kids are absolutely shitfaced. Still, the publisher of L.A.-based Saturday Night magazine and I found the wherewithal to bombard an English speaker with obnoxious reporter questions as we gripped the rails white-knuckled.
He's a teacher, he's drunk, his friend is hopelessly slumped over a seat and he thinks it's a shame French people don't think it's important to learn English. Much appreciated sentiments, since I've been scraping by with my high school French knowledge since I got here, but he didn't even have any French pickup lines to give us. And, unless French girls really dig stereotypical teacher jackets — replete with leather elbow patches — this guy is totally not getting laid tonight. "Yeah, I look forward to this every year; this is it," he said before gazing out the window, waiting for that hangar to rise.

"Paris is not France," my tour guide Gilles said as we left Saint-Malo, an area blessed with a stunning windswept beach and naval-armada era battle installations. "That's why Parisians come to Brittany as tourists. It's a very beautiful place, but it's not France." He also told us the local kids sometimes spit on the Parisians tanning on the beach from on top of the battlements — nothing like an early tide.
It's readily apparent the difference between Brittany and Paris is analogous to that between New York and the Midwest. Tourists on each side of the Atlantic stumbling around big cities where everyone is in perpetual hurry is probably the reason so many Americans see the French as pompous jerks, and vice-versa.
In France, tour guides are required to go through rigorous training before becoming certified, and Gilles has a joke for every situation, including non-situations. I guess driving, pointing and telling tourists funny stories about stuff for nearly two decades will give you a knack for what Americans will laugh at: weird puns and double entendres. Going from eating three-course meals three times a day at fancy restaurants featuring that famous smelly cheese with a wisecracking Frenchman to a "Cripple Creek" at Silver Mine Subs with a your-mom-joke-telling roommate is an unwelcome culture shock. I wish Gilles was my dad.
Stumbling off the bus, I run into a group of fashionably dressed 20-somethings swigging red wine out of the bottle and whipping the empty glasses into what can only be described as a wine-bottle disposal unit. I didn't want to wait in line for booze though, so, instead of going inside with our teacher friend, we checked into the press hangar — that's right, press hangar — but these guys were wasted too. So I waited in line at the bar there.
Not that they're trying to butter us up or anything, but this place has red carpeting and a decor scheme straight out of "Queer Eye." Also, there are these guys walking around with mobile video projectors attached to their backs — I haven't been able to figure that one out yet. A Finnish reporter and I buy beers and have a healthy discussion about Conan O'Brien and his meddling in their parliamentary politics. (He's not actually that popular over there.)
Back at the shows, I can't help but notice a lone, bald-headed security guy angrily leaning over the barricade railing with an outstretched arm yelling at every crowd-surfer, wanna-be surfer and the enablers. It's obviously a hopeless endeavor, but every time another one pops up, I could swear he's going to pull out an industrial-sized can of mace, jump into the inebriated sea and re-enact a scene from "300." We've all seen overzealous security meatheads at shows, and he's easy to hate. Yet I can't help but feel bad for him. What kind of asshole tells his employee, "Hey, tell the thousands of drunk, dancing fanatics to stop crowd-surfing at a rock concert." Plus, his presence adds a necessary antiestablishment element of danger to having your ass groped as it's passed through a sea of horny dudes.
Meanwhile, I'm beginning to notice a recurring theme as Dead Kids wrestles around the stage in a drunken stupor to the delight of the crowd. These guys are without a doubt the best band there I had never heard of, somehow managing to achieve a level of inebriation greater than that of their audience. Plus, once frontman Mike Frankel realized I was directly under him snapping hundreds of photos, he posed for some epic "American Idol"-style hero shots.
Brittany has no shortage of great characters living in epic surroundings, and not just the old mustached French guys carrying baguettes under their shoulders in striped shirts. (We saw that, too.)
Earlier that day we were almost trampled on the sidewalk by 100 high school kids on strike, singing "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes, something about establishing national testing standards.
"I paint radishes, you see those paintings on the wall?" the maitre d' of a fancy eatery said after discovering we were journalists. "I like to paint every part of the radish." Sure enough, an entire wall of the Rennes restaurant was adorned with quaint paintings of radishes. Radishes in rows, radish close-ups and radishes inside smaller paintings of radishes, all carefully framed and well-placed. I've heard rumors of sculptures as well. Just Google Al Furlukin if you're a fellow radish aficionado. Or fetishist.
Back at Trans, concertgoers deftly roll joints in the front row while security guards nod approvingly and chuckle, but we still have a bitch of a time trying to get into the photo pit with a standard media pass.
Finally, the crowd begins to steam out, and the body count rises. Drunken bodies slumped across the floor, draped over other listless forms or folded against the walls. Looks like a zombie plague hit. The French aren't as obsessed with rounding up and institutionalizing their drunks. I get the feeling that in a few hours, someone will poke these fortunate souls with a broom handle and send them on their way back through Brittany and to the remainder of a bleak winter.
In the words of one hot dog vendor, "We're all out. But next year."

Bassey Etim is a senior majoring in political science and journalism. Any questions about Rennes? Trans? Drunk Frenchmen? Shoot him a line at betim@badgerherald.com.